User Unable to Grant Login Access to Salesforce Support

ISSUE: Salesforce Users are unable to grant login access to Salesforce Support

Background

I recently ran into an issue in which I needed several of my users to Grant Login Access to Salesforce support. They've been running into a peculiar issue in which Lightning Record Pages are not displaying correctly for them. I haven't been able to isolate the issue myself -- so called in the gurus at Salesforce.

Salesforce asked that each of the users who were having the issue grant login access to Salesforce Support. I created a guide to help my users navigate through menu screens that were unfamiliar to them, and was surprised when one of the users reported they did not have the option grant login access to Salesforce Support.

Ooops! I thought every user had the ability to grant login access to salesforce. I poked around on the web to find out if anyone else had run into this -- eventually found the answer.

The Fix

The ability to grant login access to salesforce support is enabled by default, but at some point, I must have disabled this configuration option. To fix, navigate to Setup > Login Access Policies. Toggle the "Available to Users" radio button on Salesforce Support.

Resolving "Read All Accounts" Permissions Issue with the "old" Profile Editor

Problem / Issue: 

As part of a project to enable Lightning Knowledge for an org, I was tasked with doing some clean-up of various user Profiles in the org. An audit found that the Data Migration profile had access to the Knowledge object, but shouldn't have. When I went to remove these permissions, Salesforce presented an error (see below): I couldn't remove access to the Knowledge object until I first resolve the permission issues on Account Brands and Scorecard Associations.  

No problem -- this Data Migration Profile shouldn't have access to either of those objects either, so I thought I'd just go remove them. The trouble is that if you're using the Enhanced Profile Editor, you can't make permission changes to multiple objects.

For example, as soon as I went to make remove access to the Account Brands object, Salesforce presented an error: I couldn't remove those permissions until I first removed permission from the Scorecard Associations object:

Similarly, if I tried to remove permissions from Scorecard Association, I got an error saying I had to first resolve the access permissions on the Account Brands object.

It took me a few cycles to figure out that the problem here is that unlike the original Profile Editor, the Enhanced Profile Editor doesn't allow you to make changes to 2 or more objects at the same time. Each time you make a permission change to an object, Salesforce will validate the change before allowing you to save the change. But I needed to make changes to two different objects, and the Enhanced Profile Editor wouldn't allow me to do that. 

The Fix

You need to revert back to the old Profile Editor, since it allows permission changes to multiple objects before a Save operation is committed. To revert back to the old profile editor, go to Setup and in the Quick Find type and select "User Management Settings", then disable the "Enhanced Profile List Views" setting. You can come back and enable this setting after you have made the necessary profile permission changes. 

So if you're running into problems with profile editing, keep in mind that the old Profile Editor was kept around for a reason -- there are simply some things you can't do in the new Enhanced Profile Editor mode.

Converting 10-Lines of Apex code to a 1-line Validation Rule Formula

Code clean-up is what I'm doing these days ... lots of code clean-up. One of our Salesforce.com orgs (we have sixteen of them) currently has 72% test coverage in production. I'm not sure how the previous administrators were able to install code below the 75% threshold, but they managed. I'm tasked with getting that code cleaned up, so I can deploy a new release.

While looking for areas to improve code coverage, I stumbled upon this trigger:

trigger checkAccountPhoneNumberBiBu on Account (before insert, before update) {
   for (Account account : Trigger.new) {
      if (account.Phone==null) continue;
      Pattern p = Pattern.compile('[-() ]');
      String sPhone = p.matcher(account.Phone).replaceAll('');
      // check length without punctuation
      if (sPhone.length() != 10) account.Phone.addError(' Phone number must have 3 digit area code and 7 digit number');
      p = Pattern.compile('\\d');
      sPhone = p.matcher(sPhone).replaceAll('');
      if (sPhone.length() > 0) account.Phone.addError('Phone number must be formatted as (999)999-9999');
   }
}

This trigger looks at the value entered in the "Phone" field before an Account record is inserted or updated; if the phone field is not in the (999)999-9999 format, it errors out and notifies the user to enter the phone # in the proper format.

In addition to this Apex code, the developer also had to write a testmethod to ensure coverage of the trigger. His code was only getting 67% test coverage (which is what brought the trigger to my attention in the first place).

As I started looking at what I needed to add to the testmethod to ensure 100% coverage, I realized it would be easier to just get rid of the trigger altogether, and replace it with a Validation Rule. That 10 lines of Apex code was reduced to a 1-line formula in a validation rule:

NOT(REGEX(Phone, "\\D*?(\\d\\D*?){10}"))

Here's the validation rule in the UI:

Simpler is always better. Any time you can minimize your code (or get rid of it altogether), you make your org simpler, smaller and eaiser to maintain. I'm a fan of that.

Another benefit of implementing this as a validation rule is that I'm able to control where the error message is displayed. Previously, the trigger method displayed the error message at the top of the detail record page layout.  With validation rules, you can display error messages either at the top of the screen or at exact field where the error was made; I generally prefer the latter.

Want to see this and other useful validation rules? Check out the Useful Validation Formulas guide by Salesforce.com.

Salesforce Updates - Sept 10, 2010

#Dreamforce



Count Down: @RatherGeeky reminded me that there are only 83 days until Dreamforce 2010. Have you registered and booked your reservations? This will be the biggest Dreamforce yet, with more than 20,000 attendees! Register here…

Community Conference: One of the things I love most about Salesforce.com is the overwhelming strong support I get from the user community. There are thousands of active community users who are writing Salesforce blogs, creating or promoting new feature enhancements on the IdeaExchange, participating in local user groups, asking and answering questions on the Answers forum, and collaborating on the community forums. This year, at Dreamforce 2010, we’ll have a chance to all meet each other. Dreamforce 2010 will have a community meet and greet! Read more…


#Administrators

150 (or rather, 32) Steps to Salesforce Greatness: AvideonCRM published an article titled “150 Steps to Salesforce Greatness”. The article actually only lists the first 32 steps (which is fair: the consulting company needs to keep some trade secrets!). Trying to figure out where to start with your new Salesforce.com setup? Check out this article! It has some great starting tips. Read more…

Mass Emails with Salesforce.com: What is the best way to do mass emails with Salesforce.com? Check out this article by @TFrankfurt; in the article, he talks about the current limitations of mass emails through Salesforce, and shares some popular AppExchange Email solutions to help break past these barriers – very helpful blog! Read more…
 200+ Free Salesforce Apps from Force.com Labs: Force.com Labs has been crazy busy the past few months, churning out new apps on the AppExchange – all free. The best thing about these apps (aside from being free) is that they are open source. Sometimes I’ll take these apps and use them just as ideas for other apps that my org needs; sometimes the apps give me ideas for optimizing code that for other apps that already exist within our org. Either way, if you’re not familiar with these apps, you should probably spend some time to get acquainted with them. Check them out here…


#Developer


Force.com Developer Meetup in Chicago: Salesforce.com is hosting a Developer Meetup at the Summit Executive Center in Chicago, IL this Wednesday (9/15) from 6:00 PM – 9:30 PM. There are two tracks planned: Intro to Force.com Workshop and a session on developing Chatter Apps. Quinton Wall and Reid Carlberg will be guest speakers at the event. If you are local to the Chicago area, and have wanted to learn more about developing applications on the Force.com platform, this meet-up will be a great intro! Read more…

Learning How to Code: “I want to learn Apex and Visualforce and all that other stuff, but I don’t know where to begin.” Apex is a structured programming language, very similar to Java. Visualforce is a structured mark-up language, very similar to HTML. If you don’t already know the basics of these topics, jumping in to Apex / Visualforce programming can be a challenge. Google can help! Check out these tutorials on learning HTML, CSS and Javascript from Google. (Thanks, @CRMFYI for the link!) Read more…

Use Visualforce to Add Inline Google Maps to Account / Contact Page Layouts: This is an oldie, but a goodie (that I rediscovered this past weekend). @phollo wrote a blog showing how to add Inline Google Maps to your Salesforce.com page layouts. It’s a great article, complete with sample code. Read more…

Cloud Computing for Java Developers Webinar (VMforce): Jeff Douglas wrote a great review of the recent Force.com webinar, “Cloud Computing for Java Developers”. I’m really looking forward to the REST API that will be piloted in the upcoming Winter’11 release! Read more…

The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers

"If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton


Updated:  I found an error in my earlier posting: the value of the Alexa ranking was reversed. I mistakenly thought that a high Alexa ranking was favored over a lower ranking.  I corrected the ordering based on the Alexa scores (sorry, Mike - now I'll have to buy YOU a beer at Dreamforce!). 

Mark Fidelman (EVP Sales @ MindTouch) recently wrote an article for the Cloud Ave blog titled, "The Most Influential Technical Communication Bloggers".  I recognized a few names, added several to my Google Reader feed, but most were unfamiliar to me.  Blogs are a primary information source for me, and I read a lot of them each week.  When I first started working with Salesforce, I grew up on a steady diet of Gokubi.com, CRM FYI, X2 On-Demand, and Perspectives on Salesforce.  These were the giants on whose shoulders I stood.

I compiled a list of Salesforce.com Bloggers, and then because I was curious, ranked them in a similar manner as Fidelman's Most Influential Blogger article: a weighted formula across a range of metrics, including Alexa, Klout Influence, Google Page Rank, Technocrati Authority, and Twitter Followers.  I also added a 6th category: # Blog Posts YTD.  Each category was given an equal weight, scaled on a rank of 1-10. With 6 categories, a blog could have a ranking between 6-60 – the most influential bloggers scoring at the top side of that range.

I started with a simple Google search on “Salesforce Blogs”, recording the URL for each. I arbitrarily stopped after the first six pages returned by the search engine. If the authors of various blogs included links to other Salesforce blogs (and many did), I added those to my research list, as well. In the end, I found 47 different Salesforce.com blogs. To be included in the ranking, a blogger needed to focus their posts on Salesforce.com, with at least 6 Salesforce-related blogs posted YTD.


For blogs that were co-authored, I used the Twitter account associated with the “Retweet” button on that blog. For instance, the Cloud Blog is co-authored by various Salesforce.com executives: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, and Steve Gilmor. The “retweet” button on this blog uses the Twitter alias @salesforce, so that is what I used to evaluate the Klout influence and Twitter following of that blog.

Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers
Here are the Top 10 Most Influential Salesforce.com Bloggers (NOTE: There were ties for 4th, 9th and 10th place):

 
Here is the detail break-out for all of the blogs that made the ranking qualifications:
 

Rank	Author	# Posts YTD	Alexa	Google Page Rank	Technocrati Authority	Klout Score	Twitter Followers
1	Jon Mountjoy, Quinton Wall, Reid Carlberg, Umit Yalcinalp, Dana Le	177	200,867	5	126	25	1436
2	Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Peter Coffee, John Taschek, Steve Gilmor	45	312	0	0	49	9025
3	Steve Anderson	16	1,527,075	6	1	25	474
4	Jeff Douglas	69	650,409	4	0	19	417
4	Appirio Tech Blog	16	304,254	5	0	10	1181
5	Scott Hemmeter	6	1,275,872	6	1	25	1436
6	Jeff Grosse	11	2,962,398	4	0	28	1532
7	JP Seabury	6	2,918,131	3	1	18	1066
8	MK Partners	97	1,020,411	3	1	10	169
9	David Schach	7	8,045,399	4	0	43	934
9	Jason Venable	27	2,213,081	3	0	19	167
10	Mike Gerholdt	18	27,426,342	3	0	22	627
10	Alessandro	19	2,978,238	3	0	13	202
11	Mike Leach	23	4,393,577	0	0	14	585
11	Jared Miller	10	0	2	0	7	251
12	Wes Nolte	12	408,999	0	0	8	211
13	Mark Christie	31	911,745	2	0	0	34
14	Joel Dietz	16	12,357,441	0	0	15	142
15	John Rotenstein	10	3,855,810	6	0	0	45
16	ForceTree	10	2,059,232	2	0	0	0
17	ForceDotCom	12	10,359,827	2	0	0	0
18	Sid	6	9,440,652	0	0	0	0

Honorable Mentions
There were 30 other blogs, but many were filtered from the rankings process due to the infrequency of their posts (the arbitrary cut-off was 6 posts YTD, averaging 1 per month). Of these blogs, Honorable Mentions go to:

Michael Smith, Simon Fell, Liz Kao, Jesse Lorenz, John Coppedge, Alex Sutherland, Joe Ferraro, Michael Smith, Dave Manelski, Interactive Ties, Shamrock CRM, and Sam Arjmandi.

If I missed your blog (or a Salesforce-related blog that you read regularly), please let me know!

Sending Scheduled Reports to Individual Users in a Restricted Report Folder

Scheduled Reports is a powerful feature of Salesforce.com.  It allows you to schedule a specific report to run – and have the results emailed in HTML format – to a specific user or group of users.  You can configure a report to run each morning at 7:00 AM, and have that report automatically emailed to all your direct reports.  Very handy!

One of my users with delegated “report admin” privileges uses this to great advantage, but ran into a problem:


“I have a Salesforce.com Report Folder which is restricted to a certain users: it is only visible to Manager and Director Roles. One of the managers has requested a copy of a specific report from this folder be emailed to him at the start of each business day. Scheduled Reports supports this functionality, but not if the report is in a restricted access folder. When you set the folder access so that only certain roles can access it, Salesforce.com does not allow you to select “Users” when setting up the “Send Email To” option. The Report Builder option only allows Public Groups, Roles, and Users. What should I do? I don’t want to create a “Public Group” with just one person in it, and I don’t want to make this entire folder public – help!”

Here’s the workaround I gave her:

1.) After hours, when no one is likely to be accessing the system, change the restricted access report folder to public.


2.) Use the “Schedule Future Runs” feature to schedule the report. Because the report folder is now “public”, you can select a filter option that allows you to send it to a specific user. Save the scheduled report settings.


3.) Go back to the Report Folder access settings, and change the access privs back to the original restricted access.




Viola - the scheduled report will still be sent to the users within the selected mail-to list, and your report folder is still private.

How Do I Add My Own Custom Logo to the Salesforce.com Banner?

How do I customize the top banner, so that it displays my company's org, rather than the standard Salesforce.com logo?

The logo that displays in the top left corner is defined by the application that you are currently running. Salesforce apps are selected using the drop-down in the top-right corner. In the image below, I'm running the "Ideas" app, which uses the Salesforce.com Service Cloud logo.

TRIVIA: The default logo is updated several times a year, with each seasonal Salesforce.com upgrade. Salesforce.com usually comes up with two or three different logo ideas, and offers Customers a chance to vote for their favorite logos on the Idea Exchange. The logo that wins the most votes is used for the next release.

If you want your own custom logo, then you'll need to build your own "custom app". That's not nearly as difficult as it might sound. In Salesforce.com, an App is simply a group of Tabs. The "Sales Cloud" app includes tabs like Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, etc. You can create a custom app that uses these same Tabs, but features your company logo. Here's how:

1.) Using image editing software, modify your company logo so that it is less than 300 pixels wide and 55 pixels in height. The image must be a GIF or JPEG format, and less than 20 KB in size. Save this image to the Documents tab. Be sure to mark the image as an "Externally Available Image" when you upload it to the Documents library (see below):

2.) Create your custom app. Select "Setup -> Create -> Apps -> New".

Follow the App Wizard prompts to give the App a name, add your logo, and select the tabs that you want to be visible when users run this app.

That's all there is to it!

TIPS AND TRICKS:

Use a logo with a transparent background, unlike my sample above. If you use a logo with a colored background, you'll spend a lot of time tweaking the color scheme of your tabs so that they don't clash with the banner. The cyan background in my sample doesn't blend very well with the default green of the home tab logo ... blech!

During the photo editing stage, trim your logo so that it is exactly 300 x 55 pixels -- even if that means adding a filler space around the edges. If your logo doens't match these dimmensions exactly, Salesforce will resize the image to fit, but not always. You may find that your logo is distorted on some screen transitions, or that it displays outside the banner borders.

Each App that you build can have it's own logo. The number of Apps that you can make (and/or upload from the AppExchange) depends on what type of licenses you have:

Personal Edition	n/a
Contact Manager	1
Group Edition	1
Professional Edition	5
Enterprise Edition	10
Unlimited Edition	Unlimited
Developer Edition	10

The custom app that you build (just so that you can display your own company logo) does count against the number of Apps you can download and run from the AppExchange -- so keep that in mind!

Pretty quick, pretty simple!

Training Tips for Your Administrator

Our administrator has spent considerable time developing her skills in SF. I would like to provide her with some additional training but I believe after reviewing the course syllabus that the content provided by SF is too basic. Does anyone have any suggstions regarding training that might be helpful? We are located in the NYC area and are using the Professional edition. -- Connie Ducaine

Here are some ideas:

1.) Have your Administrator connect and get involved with the local Salesforce.com User Group. There are many User Groups around the world, you can find your local chapter here: http://www.salesforce.com/community/community/ On the right sidebar, in the section labeled Local User Groups click your region of interest, and register to join.

Salesforce.com User Groups are organized and run by volunteers within the Salesforce user community -- not by Salesforce. They're a great way to connect with other administrators, developers, partners, or even Salesforce employees. User group members share personal experiences, learn how others are using the platform, and have a unique opportunity to bring some of those ideas back into their own organization's instance of Salesforce.com.

2.) Even if you opt to not send your Administrator to training, consider sending them to get their certification. For more information, click here. While the training courses are designed to specifically help students with the certification exams, an experienced administrator will probably have no difficulty with the them. There are also plenty of online resources that will help students prepare for the exams. This is a great opportunity to show recognition for your hard-working employee!

3.) Have your Administrator get her own Salesforce.com Developer account. She can get one here: http://developer.force.com/

That site also provides a great deal of information on how to get started with some of the more advanced features of the tool. The Developer edition is a bit more "full-featured" than the Professional edition, so she can really spread her wings -- digging into more advanced features like writing triggers, designing Visualforce pages, and experimenting with AppExchange packages.

4.) Have your Administrator spend some time on in the Salesforce Community website. There is so much information here: Best Practices, Training & Recordings, Developer Blogs, etc. If she's really hot stuff, she might be interested in helping other users with their questions in the discussion forums.

5.) Want to really get her excited about learning more about the platform? Send your adminstrator to the annual Salesforce.com user conference: Dreamforce. This is a 3-day conference in San Francisco CA, designed for users, developers, and partners. The event is highly engaging, full of break-out sessions for users of all skill levels. I guarantee that when she leaves Dreamforce, her head will be swimming in ideas for how she can do more for your organization with the Force.com platform.

I think it's great that you're keeping her focused on advancement and improvement on her Salesforce skills. There are lots of resources out there, even if you're not interested in the actual training classes.

It's really nothing personal, but I don't want to Stay-in-Touch

Do you have users that create contacts in Salesforce.com, but don't need the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up messages?

Sales professionals and account teams may benefit from the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature, because it prompts them to periodically check-in with their contacts and keep the contact information up-to-date.

However, other users groups in your organization may need the ability to create Contacts, but have no interest in the feature. Support teams, for instance, who might deal with customers on a "one-and-done" basis may need to create a contact to associate with their Case, but not need to do periodic follow-ups with that contact after the case is fully resolved.

The "Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature is enabled by default across all profiles, but you can easily disable it in the User Profile (click to enlarge):