Salesforce Spring Cleaning, Part 1: Automation

It's not quite astronomical spring here in New York yet, but it is meteorological spring… so it's time for some spring cleaning!

As the admin of your PatronManager account, you're probably pretty busy most of the time, creating reports, refining processes, answering questions for your users… there's plenty to do. Outside of those day-to-day functions, though, there are lots of other tasks that don't need your constant attention but still shouldn't be forgotten about forever. In our next three posts, we'll make some suggestions for things you might include in a quarterly cleanup of your Salesforce account.

Automation and Forms Audit

With workflows, Processes, web forms, and triggers, your PatronManager/Salesforce account can take care of a lot of work on its own, without needing direct action from you. It's kind of like driving a car that's equipped with cruise control -- you get on the highway, you get up to speed, and then you can take your foot off the gas and relax for a bit. But your car doesn't magically transform into a self-driving one -- it's probably not a great idea to take a nap or read a book and trust the machine to do ALL the work for you. You still need to check in every once in a while and make sure that everything is working smoothly and safely. Today's "spring cleaning" checklist is about auditing your automation.

1) Workflows and Processes

"write a description?!"

• Do you know what all of your workflows and processes are doing? Is everything that's active something that actually should be active? When you created those automation actions, were you kind enough to yourself to write a clear and helpful description that you can look back at now and understand? If the answer to any of these questions is "no," now's a good time to fix it.
• Review everything that's active in production, and write some notes on any of the ones that aren't clear. If there's anything that's a real mystery (and that'll probably be a Process more than a Workflow, in our experience), hop over into your sandbox (refreshing it if needed) and experiment with it until you understand what it does.
• Also, if you've been using your account for a while, you might have a whole bunch of older Workflows that can now be combined into a single Process!

2) Web Forms

"please give us money"

• If you're using PatronManager, you probably have at least three places on the web that your patrons use to interact with your organization: Your ticketing site, your donation form(s), and your email signup form(s). When was the last time you tested those forms yourself? Do you have a good sense of your patrons' experience online?
• Bring your colleagues into the conversation too! Make sure people from sales, fundraising, and marketing also review and their respective forms. Are you effectively communicating the right message to your patrons? Do the forms reflect your organization's current priorities?

3) Email Templates

ack!

• Related to both automation and web forms -- your account probably sends out all sorts of emails automatically. (Donation acknowledgements, order confirmations, volunteer schedules… etc.). When was the last time you (or anyone!) read and updated them? Again, rope in your colleagues to make sure that you all still like / agree with whatever you're saying in these automatic messages.

(Part 2, part 3)

Spring '16 For the Rest of Us

Even though we're just getting into the thick of things winter-weather-wise here in New York, Salesforce rolled out its Spring '16 release this month. 

While there were a ton of new exciting developments made to Lightning Experience in this release, if you're like us -- not quite ready to roll it out -- you may be wondering, "what's in this release for me?" 

Here are some neat things sure to make admins everywhere pretty happy! 

Chatter Things

Broadcast Chatter Groups

Salesforce has introduced a new type of Chatter group called "Broadcast Only," which means that only the group owner or group managers can post messages to it.

This is great way to create a place for staff-wide announcements, while preventing others from posting to the group with off-topic messages. The rest of your staff will still be able to comment on the posts in a Broadcast group.

(Groups that are not meant for the whole staff--private or unlisted groups, which are "invite only"-- can also get the Broadcast Only treatment.)

"dear staff, there are valentine's day cookies in the kitchen!"

More relevant @mention suggestions

You might have already noticed this change, before you realized it was an official improvement -- we definitely did. This makes it much easier to address your posts to the right person. When you start typing @ + someone's name, instead of seeing an alphabetical list of users (including external Chatter users or Community users that you're probably not talking to most of the time), the list starts with the people you interact with the most!

Process Builder Improvements (for Intermediate/Advanced Users)

We loooooove Process Builder. Now there's a little bit more to love!

Reuse names and descriptions when creating a new version of a Process

Previously, when you cloned an existing Process to create a new version of it, you had to retype the name and description of it. Now it's smartly copied over for you and the copy is automatically assigned a version number when you save it.

"Emailing_The_Volunteer_Actual_Final_Version_Not_Broken_I_Hope"

View the names of your fields by hovering over them

It used to be virtually impossible to see the field names that were already selected in a Process Builder step. Now you can hover over the field selection box to see the whole name.

sometimes field names are much longer than this one

Reorder criteria steps by dragging and dropping

You'll also be able to easily move the parts of your Process around on the screen to change the order of the actions, instead of having to start over if you realize that your Process needs to start off differently.

magic!

Manage Everyone’s Reports and Dashboards

It used to be hard/impossible to have true administrative rights over Reports and Dashboards, because anything saved in a user's private or personal folder remained inaccessible, even if that user was deactivated. We mentioned a previous improvement that happened in Summer '15, which gave you the option of logging in as any user (and thus gaining access to their private folders) -- but now you can do even more. Using Workbench, you can write a query that will return those hidden reports and dashboards, and allow you to delete them. (Read more here in the Spring '16 release notes.)

Salesforce1 Enhanced Charts

A flash of lightning comes to Salesforce1! Even if you'e not ready to go all in with the Lightning Experience, you can benefit from some of its shiny and new chart functionality on your phone:

good job, fundraisers!

Checklist: When a Contact is marked as "deceased"

Here's a discussion question that came up in our internal company Chatter today:

"How do clients tend to handle the marking of a deceased patron in a household when things like the Account Name, Salutations, Address Names, etc need to get updated. Workflow off the checkbox?"

We started thinking about this, and decided that a hybrid approach is the best. There are a few things that should happen automatically right away if a Contact is marked as "deceased" -- like checking "Do Not Mail" box, and changing their Email Status to "Opt-out' -- but for other things like Account Name and Salutation changes at the household level, it's probably a better idea for a human to do the work, to make sure it's right and that it's handled sensitively.

Here's a terrible example that one of our coworkers shared about what can happen if you're not handling this well:

"My friend James' Mother passed away last year, and this was the letter he received in the mail. Not only is the letter wrong, but it's causing all sorts of confusion and he'll have to call them and get it all straightened out."

"dear james, we're sorry you're dead"

But, okay, does that mean you need to train your entire staff on how to make the correct changes to fields on a record when you're checking the "deceased" box? Maybe not -- it could be that the person finding out about the deceased-ness and marking the record isn't necessarily a person who needs to be super-trained on a whole cascading list of other things to do.

Instead, let's create a workflow that does those things we mentioned above, but that also creates a task or series of tasks for particular staff members to take care of the name fields, and perhaps send a condolence card, depending on the relationship to the deceased person.

Overall, the takeaway here is: When you're thinking about new workflows for your organization, consider the difference between automatic changes that can happen in the background versus things where you want an actual human to use their brain… but don't overlook the benefit of a reminder task for the latter! Create a list of the things that should happen, assign it to the right person, and you'll be in the clear.

Checklist: What to do when someone leaves

Sometimes people leave your company or organization, because they got a great new job somewhere else, or it's just time to move on, for whatever reason. And sometimes that person has a LOT of history in Salesforce or PatronManager. When our (now-former) coworker Lily left the company after almost 11 years, we realized we didn't exactly have a comprehensive checklist in place for how to handle deactivating a user with that much history and so many automatic things set up… so it was time to create one.

Some of these steps are designed to keep things from breaking; others are just intended as "discovery" so you're not leaving any black holes of information scattered around. For example, if you're hiring a replacement for the person who's leaving, that new person will probably need the same (or similar) suite of reports that the old person used to get … so we should make sure to find them all.

(Before we go on: Remember, we are never ever going to reassign an old user account to a new person, right? Right?)

1. Freeze the User.
Freezing is a relatively new Salesforce Feature (Winter '14) and it's a great shortcut to locking an exiting employee out of the account before you have a chance to run through all the other steps of a checklist. A Frozen user can't log in anymore but the license isn't freed up until you get around to deactivating them. (Freezing is even more useful in a "terminated without notice" scenario but it's helpful even in a planned-for situation.)

2. Find Hidden Reports.
If the person is leaving amicably (as Lily is), it might be a good idea to ask her to go into the "My Personal Custom Reports" folder and throw away the garbage, and re-save publicly anything useful. If you forgot to do that, you used to have to live with the fact that those reports were out of reach forever -- but as of Summer 15, things are a little easier.

3. Reschedule Scheduled Reports & Dashboards.
Go to Setup | Jobs | Scheduled Jobs, and create a new view to find just the jobs "submitted by" your departing user. Then you can click through to each one, click through to the Scheduling screen, and then modify as needed to remove the User from receiving them. You'll also need to move on to the next step and change the running user if anyone else is set up to receive them.

we miss you, lily!

4. Change Running User on Dashboards.
If you try to run a dashboard "as" a deactivated user, you get this:

we miss you, eric!

Click Edit and then change the "View Dashboard As" setting to some other user.

5. Change Ownership of Chatter Groups.
Only the owner can delete a group and only people with crazy high-level permissions can change things about groups that they don't own… so you might as well.

• Create a report that shows Chatter Groups and their owners.
• Someone with Modify All Data should go to each Group the user owns and change the owner to someone else:

theater!

6. Reassign or Stop Workflow Tasks and Email Alerts.
You can see alllllll workflow tasks by going to Setup | Create | Workflow & Approvals | Tasks

• Create a new list view on that page showing just the tasks that are assigned to the deactivated user. (For some reason, the "Assigned To" filter only seems to work if you enter the User's ID -- not their name.)
• Anyway, find the tasks and then evaluate what's going on with the workflow they belong to -- can you stop the workflow rule entirely, or do you need to change the Assignee to someone else?

7. Check Approval Processes, Queue Ownership, Assignment Rules, and Data Export.
Does your departing user play a role in any of these kinds of business process? Lily did not have any of these things so we just checked each of them in Setup and then moved on.

8. Change Ownership of Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities/Donations?

If you're using PatronPortal (in PatronManager) or any other sort of Portal functionality (in Salesforce more generally), you should run a report to find all the Accounts and Contacts that your departing user is the Owner of, and change the Owner to someone else, using DemandTools or another data manipulation tool if necessary. (For whatever reason, Portals really don't like Portal Users to be owned by users without a Role, or by users who are inactive -- the Portal User gets an error when they try to log in if that's the case.)

9. Reassign Company Primary Contact?
On the off-chance the the person leaving was actually the person who set up Salesforce in the first place, it wouldn't hurt to check the Company Information page under Company Profile in Setup and make sure they're not listed as the Primary Contact with Salesforce.

10. Mark their CONTACT Record as "Gone"
If you have Contact records for your employees and not just users (and we'll probably write a post someday about why that's a good idea), make sure to update the departing person's Contact record as well.

we miss you, piper!

11. Stay Connected!
Assuming there's no bad blood between you, you probably want to stay in touch with the person who's leaving after they move on. Remind them on their way out that if they were part of the Success Community or Power of Us HUB, and if the new company that they're moving to also uses Salesforce, they should reach out to someone to get those accounts merged when they're up and running in their new job.