Inspiration
Flexible page layouts are one of the best things about Salesforce. In the past, page layouts could be different based on the profile of the user or the record type. Lately, though, Salesforce has been making it easier to make the page layouts change based on the specifics of the record you’re looking at. For instance, take a look at this contact record. This org only has one contact record type, but it shows the upper right hand box only for donors who have given $5000 or more in a single calendar year.
This is possible because of dynamic actions, which became available in Summer ‘21. Salesforce has released dynamic forms for custom objects, but not standard objects. Until that’s available, the workaround above pretty nice. I learned how to do it from this video.
Scary Emails from Salesforce
Salesforce sometimes sends emails telling you that you have to do something, but then making it very difficult to figure out if you really have to do something. The latest one that I’ve seen is the ICU Locales email. The subject is: ACTION REQUIRED: Adopt ICU Locale Formats in Salesforce.
If you are in the US and don’t have custom code, this is unlikely to affect you. If you have custom code, you should talk to your developer about this.
If you’ve got pretty popular apps installed that get regularly updated, the app developer is very likely to update their app before this change is enforced. If you’ve an old app that hasn’t been updated in a long time, this might be a good time to uninstall it, or replace it with something newer. Lots of apps that don’t get updated anymore are easily replaceable with a flow!
This explanation here is the best one I’ve found about this change. If you got this email and this article doesn’t answer your questions, let me know, it makes sense to me and I’d be happy to help you figure out if you need to take action.
Regular Maintenance
Your Salesforce instance is a lot like a garden. Salesforce gives you a plot of dirt with a few raised beds, and it is up to you to plant, weed, fertilize, and all the rest. (I love this analogy, but it is ridiculous because I can’t even grow mint.) Most small to medium sized organizations don’t have the resources to do all of the maintenance that would be required for an inspiring Salesforce instance, but doing a little is a lot better than doing nothing. Each month, I’ll make one suggestion for some maintenance you can do – your future self will thank you for doing any of it!
This month’s suggestion is to run NPSP Health Check. There’s free training on how to do that here. Health Check can turn up little problems with data and configuration that can turn into real headaches later.
Salesforce release information that might interest you
Summer ‘21 Highlights
- Flow updates! If you’ve been slowly switching from workflow rules and process builder to flows, things are getting better all the time. Jen Lee has a great blog and always has terrific flow content. She’s got an article about the flow improvements in Summer ‘21.
- Inline editing of reports (beta)
- Download a Dashboard as an image file – perfect for sharing dashboards with team members who aren’t Salesforce users.
Winter ‘22 Highlights
- More flow updates, including flow orchestrator
- More inline editing of reports, and the feature will be out of beta
- Email Template Builder updates
NPSP release information that might interest you
Primary address type bug introduced in NPSP 3.201 (July 13): When a customer switches the Contact’s Primary Address Type (npe01__Primary_Address_Type__c) field to “None” (usually if clearing out mailing address fields), the Primary Address Type value switches to “Mailing”. More information is available here.
NPSP 3.204 (July 27) included an update to support yearly installment periods in the number of days from next donation setting. More information is available here.
NPSP 3.202 (July 9) included an emergency fix to handle an issue with Household Account naming and exclusion fields. More information is available here.
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