Admin Archives

Six Simple Steps to Improve Your Salesforce User Experience

When configuring your Salesforce org, it is important to present your data in a manner that makes it easy for your users to access and interpret. If you hide a required field at the bottom of a page layout many of your users are going to become frustrated. I have seen many organizations spend countless hours and much effort configuring page layouts so information is presented in a logical, legible format. But you have to push forward! There are a number of other places where you should spend time configuring Salesforce to improve your users’ experience. Showing key information to your users when and where they need to see it will not only make things easier, but will improve data integrity as you provide the information they need to select the appropriate records.

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries: An Admin’s Must-Have Tool

Rollup summaries are great things to have in your admin toolkit. With a rollup summary, you can summarize information about child records on a parent record when those records are in a master-detail relationship.

What Nonprofits Don’t Know About Salesforce Data Loss Can Hurt Them (And Their Mission)

What would happen to a nonprofit that uses Salesforce and loses donor information or program evaluation data? At best, it would mean a loss of team productivity in the scramble to recreate data from the Weekly Export. And at worst, it might harm the nonprofit’s reputation and ability to fulfill its mission.

Adding it Up: Understanding Roll-Up Summary Fields

Roll-up summaries are a powerful tool within Salesforce to help you analyze your data without running a summary report. They can give you data specific to the contact or household you are viewing, providing a snapshot of related donations so you can get a sense of the donor’s engagement with your organization at a glance. Standard roll-up summary fields summarize all or some related records into a calculated field on a master object. The field can display a count, sum, maximum, or minimum value from the related records, operating on numeric, currency, or date fields. You can create roll-up summaries of Opportunities on Account records, or on any master object summarizing a field from its detail records.

Data Management Tips for the Lone Wolf Admin

As a solo administrator, you’re a lone wolf, but it’s a big, dangerous world out there. The time to get smarter about managing your organization’s data has arrived. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Best Practices: Salesforce Fields

Salesforce fields are so important to a successful implementation, yet you may completely forget to really think critically about these “building blocks” of your CRM. A good analogy is this awesome lego model of the University of Colorado (your entire Salesforce instance) and an individual lego piece (one field). Miss a few fields? The history building may fall to pieces if you’re not careful. Fields organize and display your data and prompt your users to input the right data in the right spot.

Make the Most of Salesforce Security: Added Assurance in a World of Compromises

Most organization’s choose Salesforce because of its reputation for reliability, and Salesforce does a great job of maintaining a high level of security on its servers, but there are additional measures system administrators can take to further lock down their data.

Invest in Your Salesforce Administrator

It took 11 years, but salesforce.com finally created an “Admin Zone” at their annual Dreamforce conference. They have a Developer Zone for the coders, a Foundation Zone dedicated to their nonprofit customers, a Small and Medium Business Zone and now one for Admins. Don’t get me wrong, salesforce.com wasn’t ignoring System Administrators in previous years. There have always been plenty of sessions dedicated to administrators of all skill levels. But having an Admin Zone and an Admin Keynote dedicated to administrators was recognition that Admins are a key resource for any organization, nonprofit or otherwise.

Get Connected, Lightning Fast

What if I told you that Lightning Connect enables you to create a real-time integration in an amount of time best measured by hours not days? Not only that, what if I told you it could be done with just clicks not code?

Your Organization Needs a Salesforce Administrator – Could It Be You?

At many nonprofits, and in particular at smaller organizations, staff members tend to wear many hats. There may not be someone who has “administer Salesforce” written into their job description, just as there may not be someone on staff who is responsible for maintaining the website, putting antivirus software on the computers, or fixing the printer when it jams. Nonetheless, those are all important tasks, and when it comes to Salesforce, it’s crucial to have a designated administrator.