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Salesforce.com Certification Maintenance Fees Explained [FAQ]

March 9th, 2010 · Certification Updates, Certified Administrator, Certified Advanced Administrator, Certified Advanced Developer, Certified Consultant, Certified Developer

There seems to be quite a bit of confusion surround the maintenance fees for certified professionals.  I was having a hard time understanding the fee schedule myself, so I asked for clarification.  Here’s what I learned:

You will be charged $100 per year per certification track you maintain.  Maintenance fees start one year (or 3 releases) after your first achieved certification within that track.  There are 2 tracks:

Administrator (entails Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Consultant)

Developer (entails Developer, Advanced Developer)

In short, the maximum amount you will be charged per year is $200 for certification maintenance, although each track may be billed at different periods.

Hope this clarifies for those with any remaining questions.  Cheers,

John

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Setup Enhancer Adds Search Functionality to Salesforce Setup Menu [Time Savers]

February 15th, 2010 · Tips & Tricks

Even when I remember specifically where each submenu lives within the Salesforce setup, searching for me is more intuitive and faster, which is why I was super excited to read this post from Jeff Grosse (@CRMFYI).  This Greasemonkey script adds a search menu to the Salesforce setup window and filters the setup menu on the fly:

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What you need:

FF 3.5+

Greasemonkey

Setup Enhancer Greasmonkey Script

 

Notes:

Make sure that Greasemonkey is installed and you’ve restarted Firefox before attempting to install the Setup Enhancer script.

You can post enhancement requests to the discussion board of the script.

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Skype from your contact records [Skype]

January 24th, 2010 · Tips & Tricks

image I’ve been playing with VOIP products a lot recently.  For instance, I learned you can make VOIP calls through Gizmo5 [registration currently closed] using your Google Voice number.  That’s pretty handy when you’re in another country – so long as you’ve got wifi, you’ve got a US phone number.  For free.  Since Google purchased Gizmo5, I expect we’ll see some interesting offerings when the product is re-launched.

But I digress.  As great as the above combo is, I still often connect with others using Skype.  This lead me to start collecting their IDs on the contact record.  From there it is pretty simple to create a URL to dial them through Skype directly.

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Skype ID is a text field.  Skype URL is a formula field using the following:

IF( LEN(Skype_ID__c) > 0, HYPERLINK("skype:" & Skype_ID__c & "?call", "Skype " & Skype_ID__c ), "No Skype ID")

This can also be implemented as a button using this code:

skype:{!Contact.Skype_ID__c}?call

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Happy dialing.  Cheers,

John

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Use PhraseExpress to Shorten Variables & Code [Tips & Tricks]

December 8th, 2009 · Tips & Tricks

I am typically not doing a ton of programming, but when I do I like to use meaningful (long) variable names, and frequently mistype them.  Woe was me, until…

I type: pb# and the code is translated automatically.

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The configuration is really simple:

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So far I have used this mostly for shortening email addresses, company names, and URLs.  But when I fired up a DE tonight for some light code testing it hit me that this could be a huge time/pain saver for you heavy coders out there.

PhraseExpress is Windows only (Mac users can try TextExpander), free for non-commercial use, $49.95 otherwise. 

Note: PhraseExpress v7 was recently released, includes Windows 7 support and new features.

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Cheat Sheets [Downloads]

December 3rd, 2009 · Tips & Tricks

Check out the developerforce wiki for some great cheat sheets.  I can see how these would be an absolute lifesaver, especially during the initial learning process.

[edit: updated URL]

http://developer.force.com/cheatsheets

[edit: Direct to PDF shortcuts removed by request]

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