It’s dead, Jim! And… it’s ALIVE!

My beloved mule work horse race horse, a wonderful  Early 2015 (A1502) MacBook Pro, died. Well – not completely. Over some weeks, the keyboard and touchpad took breaks from working. And just after I had completed my presentation at Force Academy LA, they completely passed away and never recovered since. The repair took more than six weeks – and today, my computer is back… they swiped the interior, replaced connectors, found that I was eligible for a display swap, enrolled me, got everything up and running again… AND REPLACED THE UPPER CASE! And that’s basically not just an uppercase, not just an upper case with some stickers. It was a diary. A friendship album. Memories of how I became the Salesforce professional I am today. Continue reading “It’s dead, Jim! And… it’s ALIVE!”

Why it’s hard to (really) love Process Builder

It’s true – we all celebrated Process Builder as a game changer when it was introduced to our beloved Salesforce platform about two years ago. Then we found out that is had issues with bulkification. Then we learned that we can do quirky things with it, break governor limits. And we learned that it will send exception messages in a completely new way. And then, there’s the issue with deploying them.

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Tahoe Dreamin’ 2018: It simply works! … until it breaks (Pt. 1/5)

I was presenting at Tahoe Dreamin’ 2018 with Meighan Brodkey (@meighanSF) on Jan 19th, 2018. We had so many questions raised in the Q&A, so many people who posted us later on, so that I think it’s worth to not just share the slides, but elaborate on that in a series of blog posts. If you need a quick overview, the  slides are already up on slideshare. This is #1 in a series of five blog posts, covering the high level principles that we were advising you to adopt for your declarative development lifecycle.

Continue reading “Tahoe Dreamin’ 2018: It simply works! … until it breaks (Pt. 1/5)”

Salesforce Admin/Dev Essentials

A discussion started by Tim Wiech led me and quite a number of friends from the Salesforce Ohana to discuss the very tools each dev or admin should know and probably use most of the day. It took us roughly 2 hours to share our thoughts and come up with even more and even better ideas. But eventually, we had the list to end all lists: Salesforce Admin/Dev Essentials (use the comments to share your ideas)

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Mr. Einstein – meet the Baldforce!

When Einstein Predictive Vision was announced, I joined the pilot and tried it out immediately. Back then, the responses were some special kind of awkward, but it improved quickly. Yet, building and transmitting a dataset and training a model was a bit clumsy when doing it just by the API. And then, there came my friend Jean-Michel and said: “Here’s my new product. Let me know how you like it!”

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Open sourced: Time tracking to Salesforce with Harvest

Time tracking has always been a pain for my team, even though we once built our own time cards in our org, then fell back to submitting Google Sheets timesheets and finally ended up with Harvest and Forecast. Both are by no means perfect, but they deliver exactly what we need – so Harvest it is. All we needed was a Salesforce integration and I took up the loose ends that MavensMate’s Joe Ferraro left for me in 2011 – and *boom* – it works. Continue reading “Open sourced: Time tracking to Salesforce with Harvest”

Why Omni-Channel suddenly stops working…

Geez, what a nasty thing. I implemented Omni-Channel lately to allow for a very limited number of staff skim through a huge heap of records. Omni Channel is a huge feature for this task: You can define queues for different objects, assign queues to channel, define how many items each agent can handle at a time, distribute work among agents that have capacity and so on.

Now, if something stops working abruptly on the Salesforce platform, anyone should know what happened, but I was looking for the less obvious reasons anyway. So, here’s the note to myself, and all others who have been failed by Omni-Channel all of a sudden:

  • Omni-Channel has an own set of limits, and these strictly enforced limits. 10,000 items can be simultaneously pending, and 5,000 items can be routed per hour. Numbers vary by edition, but not really: Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance have these limits, and the feature is not available for Personal, Group, and Contact Manager editions. That’s it. Therefore: First point to check for all Omni-Channel Mishaps is the limit consumption.