Inspiration
Lately I’ve been working on some task automation that required code in the past and doesn’t anymore, thanks to Flows. Flows can replace Workflow Rules and Process Builder for acknowledgement tasks, but Flows can also perform weekly scans of major donor accounts to see who qualifies for a cultivation task.
Flows have real potential for automated data cleanup, as well, but for now you’ve got to use some workaround to deal with the various limits, which aren’t as clearly documented as I’d like. (They are documented, but in my experience the information is all a little scattered.) There’s this Idea you can upvote. There are also some workarounds out there, including pauses and Unofficial SF’s Flow actions, which I’m hoping to play around with in the next few weeks.
Scary Emails from Salesforce
You probably got two different emails from Salesforce recently. You might have gotten a dozen versions of the one about deleting Sandboxes. Those seemed to go to all users, not just System Administrators, which caused a lot of confusion. I think the thing that confuses people is that every few years Salesforce decides to delete all of the unused Sandboxes, rather than doing that kind of thing regularly.
The next email was about Enhanced Domains. (Before we go any further – if you aren’t using My Domain, please start using it now. ) It was a little easier to parse than a lot of Salesforce emails. All of these emails are tough for Salesforce to write. They can’t know all the things you might have customized in your org, and so they can’t predict what might break when they make a change. In my experience, they’ve worked pretty hard to make sure that simple instances don’t have to make changes. (This is also a reason to choose simplicity whenever you can – you’ll have much less to worry about from future changes.)
This email included links to good resources. (There are always links, but sometimes they’re even more confusing than the email.) In particular, this page helps you figure out if your org can turn on Enhanced Domains today. This group (login with your Salesforce credentials) is dedicated to helping people with the change. I’m guessing that the orgs I’m working with right now won’t have any trouble turning this on, but I’m playing with it in a Sandbox now to be sure. I’ll update again in a month!
NPSP Release Information
This Trailhead is an easy to understand explanation of what’s new. I’m curious about these Einstein predictions. I’m always very skeptical of this kind of thing, since if there’s one thing I know, it is that data isn’t just data! The video shows a Contact who has already given with a less than 100% chance of becoming a first time donor, which makes me even more skeptical. I’ll be keeping an eye on this and hoping to hear from people who have used it successfully. For the moment, I’m not turning it on.
Salesforce Release Information
A similar module is available for Platform and Apps for Spring ’22. The Flow improvements are always very useful. Beyond that, I was disappointed to find out that backup and restore is going to be pretty expensive – I haven’t heard anyone talking about less than $12,000/year. At that price, plenty of orgs would just keep doing weekly backups or stay with their current third-party backup app. Pricing for new Salesforce features and products is always a mess early on, so this is worth checking in on later on this year.
Flow Orchestrator is another thing I’m looking forward to using. Because it looks like that will be included in Service Cloud licenses, nonprofits should have access to it with all 10 free licenses. (Additional licenses that include Service Cloud are a little more expensive than straight Enterprise Licenses.)
Artisanal Data 