Catching up with the Cotswolds Salesforce Community

Last week (Thursday 25th November 2020) we hosted our last Cotswolds Salesforce Community Group event of the year. The event saw members of the local Salesforce Ohana as well as new faces come together virtually to take away valuable knowledge from our highly anticipated presentations including:

Admin Horror Stories with Connie Hazendonk

Connie is an enthusiastic Salesforce trainer and works to inspire admins and developers by sharing her great, and not so great experiences in the Salesforce ecosystem. During Connie’s session, she shared some important do’s and dont’s as a Salesforce admin and shared a few horror stories of her own.

Here are some the excellent takeaways from Connie’s session:

• Ensure you remove delete privileges from everyone that should not be deleting records from the system.
• Use permission sets (and profiles) to identify different user groups.
• Sandboxes have significant value, e.g segregating development from production, trying things out, testing what you have built and not interrupting production usage –  remember to use them!
• Testing is so important to get things right – test, test and test again! 
• Consider what behaviours users need, but don’t forget the user experience. Ask questions such as: How easy is it to use? How long does it take? How many fields need to be filled out? Can something be delivered better?

Locking it down and opening it up with Louise Lockie

Louise is an inspirational figure in the Salesforce ecosystem. Her accreditations include Salesforce MVP, 16x certified Application Architect, Certified Instructor, Women in Tech Leader and Conference Speaker.  Louise shared her excellent knowledge on Salesforce security and data access.

This was also on the face of it a back to basics session, but it is so helpful to do that sometimes and not make assumptions, and Louise surfaced some great insights and tips for even the most experienced admins! 

Here are the key points to takeaway from Louise’s session:

• Apply the principle of least privilege.
• Consider just four profiles: baseline users, sys admin, integration user and api only in your orgs. You might need a fifth profile for Chatter.
• Page layout changes can now be managed using dynamic forms and conditional sections.
• Phase out profiles and move to permission sets and permission set groups and make these are documented in the org.
• Check out visualisation tools to view security set-up outside of the org e.g such as Perm comparator.

Festive fun with the trivia quiz

Of course, our Salesforce Trivia Quiz made another comeback, but this time with a festive twist. The competition was tight and the line up was close between the participants, but there could only be one winner. Drum roll please…congratulations to Emma Keeling from Hazeldene Solutions who claimed first place on the podium! Also a huge well done to Debbie Nevin from the Down’s Syndrome Association who came second and to Barrie Robertson from Desynit who came third.

Can you help Gemma Blezard make memories?

Unfortunately, fellow TrailBlazer, Gemma Blezard was going to join us to provide an insight into her inspiring Salesforce career but was too unwell. Gemma is battling terminal cancer and is fundraising to make some special memories with her daughter and if you’d like to donate, please visit Gemma’s GoFundMe page.

See you in March 2022!

Our next step is to prepare all of the community group dates for 2022, but we are anticipating our next event to be held in March and in person with a virtual offering for those group members who cannot travel to be there in person.
Don’t forget to join our Chatter Group and keep up to date on our Trailblazer platform for updates on upcoming meetings and events.