Inspiration
If you’re not using in-line editing of List Views, now is the time to start! It is easy to create list views for yourself and use them to efficiently update records. Anyone who hates to update records can get a productivity boost from this feature, and it tends to make people a lot more willing to go into Salesforce and track their work.
A particularly nice version of this is the Kanban view for Tasks, which lets you drag and drop tasks to a new status.
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. In September, Salesforce sent out an email about a problem with Apple’s iOS 15 and the Salesforce Mobile App. If you use the Salesforce Mobile App on an Apple device, make sure you’ve updated the app.
Another recent email was sent about legacy API versions no longer being supported. These API versions are really old, and most likely this doesn’t effect you unless you’ve got custom code that is several years old.
Regular Maintenance
Are you backing up your data? Lots of organizations think they are because they’ve scheduled weekly exports, but you’ve also got to download that file each week – Salesforce doesn’t save it for you! At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced that they’re working on a native Backup & Restore product, but until that’s available, make sure you’re downloading a weekly export and saving it someplace safe, or using a third-party backup and restore tool.
To do weekly backups, go to Setup and search for Data Export. Then schedule an export for a day that is convenient for you. Salesforce will email you when the zip file is ready. Then download and save! Documentation is available here.
Dreamforce Announcements
Salesforce announced that Workflow Rules and Process Builder will be retired – at some point. This process will definitely take time, but it is a good time to start to migrate your Workflow Rules to Flows. Nearly all organizations have some active Workflow Rules. If you’ve got questions about this, let me know!
Salesforce also spent some time generating excitement about new options for Salesforce-Slack integrations. Until recently, most small to medium non-profits haven’t had obvious use cases for that integration, but that’s probably changing over the next year. If you’re an organization where people use Slack more than Salesforce and you’d like to drive more Salesforce usage, these integrations may be a great tool for that.
NPSP release information
Version 3.208 had bug fixes for GAU Rollups and Contact Merge errors. More info here.
Salesforce release information
Winter 22 is now in production orgs. See the September post for new features you might be interested in.
Spring 22 is coming, beginning in mid-January. Folks who write about Salesforce will have more content to dig into in the next few months, but some features you might be interested in are:
• Dynamic Gauge Charts for Dashboards are in Beta. If you’ve been frustrated that Gauge Chart goals have to be manually updated, this one is for you!
• More inline editing of Reports is now available.
• Salesforce Maps improvements
• Google and Microsoft integration improvements
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