14 Salesforce Inspired Lent Ideas – Jenny’s Admin Tip #50

Lent is around the corner and you would be crazy to think about giving up chocolate or beer for 40 days. Now if there is one thing that I am almost certain about then it is that fact that most of you Salesforce users have come accustomed to your own bad habits, shortcuts and unused features when using Salesforce. So surely it makes MUCH more sense to get rid of these habits for 40 days, right?

So with the help of the Salesforce community, here are 14 flippin’ awesome Salesforce inspired Lent ideas to consider this month.

1. Since it’s only 40 days, I reckon I could give up roll-up summary fields. Don’t get me wrong, I do love roll-ups, but there are now a number of viable alternatives that let you achieve the same thing (arguably even more) without using the standard functionality – like RollupHelper (https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000009i3UpEAI … , Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (https://github.com/afawcett/declarative-lookup-rollup-summaries …) and Flow Rollups (http://www.salesforceweek.ly/2015/02/how-to-create-roll-up-summaries-using-flow.html …). Chris Edwards Salesforce MVP

2. Stop being lazy and don’t not De-activate inactive users just because they are a default workflow user, field updates to that user, assignment rules ect. Freeze them if you really have too, if not, get rid (by deactivating of course) 🙂

3. For lent I am going to give up creating List View and/or reports for my users and instead, take the time to train them to do it. Bad habit of mine, because most of the time its 2 minutes to do it myself, but ends up being 2 hours to train them. –  Davina Hanchuck, Advanced Admin and Dev.

4. Got a flow that doesn’t work or you can’t figure out what it exactly does? Think creating a new one is going to solve the issue? Maybe it will but then you run the risk of creating lots of flow versions which can be UGLY! Instead of taking the shortcut, try and fix it! – Me

5. For Lent I will give up Googling the answer before actually trying to figure out the issue myself. Dorian Sutton, Salesforce certified App Developer.

6. A pet peeve of mine and I am sure many others. Do everyone a favour and give your fields, flows – wherever there is a description field add a DESCRIPTION. Not knowing what a flow or field is there for drives me cray cray!

7. I would give up using Flow! You can achieve everything you can in Flow using Process Builder and Invocable Methods. The combination of Process Builder and Invocable methods is (generally) easier for other people to understand, easier to maintain and forces you to actually test things. If you’re really daring you can even replace your most triggers (not delete) with Process Builder and Invocable Methods too, this will give your administrator full control of when your triggers run which is a really powerful thing. – Alex Tennant, Salesforce Certified EVERYTHING.

8. Give your developers a break and stop creating things straight in Live. Yes we are all guilty of it. Tut tut.

9. One thing I do all the time is not set field security settings when I create new fields. I just always skip the menu when it comes to who should have visibility and read only access to a field, my laziness costs me later when I have to go back into field security settings and mess about with each individual one! – Chris Lewis, Salesforce MVP

10. This is a great question. The challenge is that often we give up something ‘fun’ or ‘entertaining’ for Lent. Within the context of Salesforce that isn’t a positive. SO, what do I give up? Hmmm. I could give up the search box in setup menu for Lent  and navigate by the tree so that I remember where everything is. – Zachary Jeans.

11. Ugh I could totally give up the bandaid fixes! That is literally my SF pet peeve.  I am always the one saying, “why don’t we do it the right way – may take a little longer but let’s get it scalable.”  I don’t wanna give up any good shortcuts, this would be painful! BUT for Lent and only Lent i would give up the http://force.com  quick menu – i use it constantly all day! its the best shortcut ever! Lauren Jordan, Salesforce MVP and 4x Certified.

12. Well, there are a couple of bad habits that I know I should change for better productivity and to keep things organised but I just find it hard to change. The main one would be less dependency on my email inbox and more time spent recording activity against the relevant records in Salesforce. Sahebkour

13. Oooh this is tough. But I suppose a fun one to do would be to give up switching between Classic and Lightning to spot the difference. 40 days of spot the difference here I go! – Adam Pearless Certified Consultant and Trainer.

14. For lent I am going to give up giving up on declarative features at the first hurdle and defaulting straight to Apex… All too often when I approach a problem with clicks, not code, as soon as I hit one little problem I throw my toys out the pram and refuse to persevere with it, delving instead into code solutions that perhaps – I didn’t need. This lent I am going to this up, and properly learn the capabilities of clicks. Simon Lawrence, MVP Dev extraordinaire

Thanks guys! These are some pretty awesome things to try and give up for 40 days. What will you aim to give up?

See you next week.

Jenny