2nd Rule of Acquisition - Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to (Part 1)

The next step in my Salesforce Journey is learning how to code.  There are a lot of resources out there and most require some form of payment.  This post and subsequent posts will document my efforts to become a developer using low cost resources. Note to the reader, I am trying to do this without learning Java.

There are classes on Udemy and Plurasight which are low cost, but not free. I am looking at both and the stuff on Udemy is better.

There are free videos on YouTube and one that caught my eye is Path To Code. It looks pretty current and so far it is as good, if not better than the paid services.

There is a lot of duplication of concepts, but I suppose it does not hurt to hear it a few times.

218th Rule of Acquisition - Sometimes what you get free costs entirely too much.

The 218^th rule applies to my attempts at learning Apex. There is a lot of free stuff out there (videos, blogs, etc.) and some cheap stuff too. I have tried and am trying both. I am finding that it comes down to teaching style and my learning style.

Teaching style can include the format, clarity of the instructor and organization of the material. Learning style is specific to me, i.e., how do I learn best. I like videos but have gotten some benefit from text-based delivery methods as well. I also need exercises/examples that incorporate the material I just learned. I find the Apex related Trailheads require far too great a leap in knowledge for me to complete, but how many 'helloWorld' triggers can one write.

I am using some of the big name stuff but I find that it is not as compatible with my ‘style’ as I would like. It’s not bad, it’s just not as effective for me as I need it to be.

The challenge is do I stick with what I have paid/am paying for or do I research other methods. The main risks are cost and schedule, i.e., the time and in some cases money, that I need to invest to evaluate the other tools., only to find out that they are not for me.

One could argue that the 62^nd Rule applies - The riskier the road, the greater the profit, but let’s not forget the  240^th Rule - Time, like latinum, is a highly limited commodity.

The 45th Rule Of Acquisition – Expand or Die

Well, it has been a while since I posted here; over a year. Since them I have left the contract job and got a great full-time gig. I also passed my App Builder Cert! It was easier than the Administrator exam since most of what I do is declarative work.

My next certification is the Platform Developer I certification. This will be a tough one since it is a lot of material to cover. I could probably pass the exam with the help of a few study guides, but I would certainly starve as a developer.

The good news is my current job is shifting towards Apex/Visualforce solutions since we are expanding our org beyond the limits of the click-not-code projects. So far, I have worked on modifying an API and a Visualforce page.  I have my sights on a few triggers. I may even write a class or two in the next few months.

So the 45^th Rule seems appropriate for this upcoming year, or given all the studying I have to do, maybe the 103^rd – Sleep can interfere with...studying…

Two Left Feet

I worked with Conga Composer this week updating some templates. It was straightforward. I used Word to make the changes to the texts and left the merge fields alone, with one exception. I needed to adjust the date format on a field and that was a little tricky.

I had to toggle the field code and enter the desired format code; in this case it was a date code. The hard part was that it was spacing dependent and it took a few tries to figure the exact format they wanted. We don’t do a lot with modifying Conga so I expect that I will have to figure it out again at some point.

In general, if I do something a number of times I will create a document similar to a Salesforce Knowledge Article. I create it in the form of a problem such as “What to do when a Sales Number is not Generated”.  I use the same template as the knowledge article with the addition of a revision table and a related procedures note. I also add some customer unique information. I take a lot of screenshots and use a lot of detail in the instructions.

It has come in handy since there are some thing that I do a lot of one month and then don’t have to do for a long time. At some point, I hope to compile them into a procedures manual. The challenge is what do I include in the manual. It should not be how to use Salesforce, since the user should know what they are doing. So things like how to log in are not needed. It’s not meant to be a user training manual but a guide for admins to address situations unique to the company’s organization. I will also probably need to include a section on how the business is structured and a lexicon of standard business terms.

9 Days of Freedom

I passed the Spring 17 maintenance exam. It's nine days until the Summer '17 exam is released. While I am focusing on passing the App Builder exam, I have to take a break from my studies every now and then to pass the next relase exam. I try to get the out of the way as quickly as possible; though I took a little longer that I would have liked for the Spring exam.

Working with Mobile Apps

I learned about mobile apps this week. The experience reminded of the 45 Rule of Acquisition: Expand or Die. Working on this feature of Salesforce expanded my skill set and helped me prepare for the Certified App Builder Exam; mobile apps are ~3% of the exam. That might not seem like a lot, but one question can be the difference between pass or fail.

One of the neat things about working with Salesforce1 is that you can emulate it from your desktop with certain limitations (just append ‘one/one.app’ to your Salesforce URL). The org I am working with has not switched over to Lightning Experience so we get this error when we try:

Since we are not ready to switch over, I had to use the chrome desktop emulator. The chrome emulator was pretty easy to use and directions are here.

Figuring out the navigation bar, and in particular, the order of the elements presented the next challenge. If you start with the Today element, it won’t show up unless you activate it on your phone and it does not seem to work in the emulator. So while the emulator is useful, you still need your phone to check certain things.

Once that was done, I tackled the quick start actions. The process for setting these up did not differ from setting up actions on the desktop. Two things to note are:

1) You have to drag and drop on the layouts from the Salesforce1 and Lightning section; even though they are the same quick actions;

2)  There is an order to how they are displayed, so you can’t put them in the exact order you want. Check this link out for details.

I am on my way to customizing my first mobile app; I created my first useful quick action this week. I probably won't be able to post any screen shots but I need to build a few apps to prepare for certification and those I can share.

An Admin’s Strength FLOWS from the Salesforce

I created my first flow this week (starting from scratch). The details are proprietary, so no screen shots. I can discuss the general operation of the flow. Before I go into detail, I learned how to create the flow by watching a bunch of online tutorials. The one thing they all had in common was starting the flow with a Screen Element. The flow I wanted to create started from Process Builder, without direct user interaction (no Screen Element). This complicated the learning process.

Process Builder has an ‘Immediate Action’ for executing flows and the challenge was to understand how that worked and how it passed variables to the flow. Once I figured that out, it was pretty straight forward. The general flow is shown below and the steps to create it follow. We needed to automatically populate the Account team on a record using information from the Account record and a Custom Object every time a record is created or edited.

General Steps:

1) Open Flow tool.

2) Create a record look up with the required Variables from Standard Object. These are the variables that you need for your final record and anything that you need for subsequent look ups, if applicable.

3) Create a record look up with required variables from the Custom Object. These will pull the variables from the first lookup you created and create, look them up in the Custom Object, and create the fields for the final record.

4) Create the record with the variables from the prior two steps.

5) Save Flow and activate. Activation is critical since the flow won’t show up in Process Builder if it is not active.

6) Open Process Builder.

7) Create a process that passes the data to the variables in the Flow (assigned to the variable names you created).

8) Save and activate the Process.

Note that everytime you edit the flow you have to create a new process to call it.  This can be annoying when you first start to learn. Making a flow chart with the variable names can speed up this process. I expect not that I know how to create flows, there will be less versions of both the flow and the process. Also, it helps to add a note in the description of each iteration related to what change was made and what did not work in the prior iteration.