It’s Not About Technology, It’s About Ideas
The Ideas platform provides a method to collect feedback from end users, consumers, and other influencers of a product or service. The goal of ideas is to create a collaboration platform to prioritize requests and highlight delivery of past requests.
Examples of this platform in action:
http://ideas.salesforce.com
http://www.mystarbucksidea.com/
You could use this platform in any number of ways; here are a few examples:
- A suggestion box for your company
- Prioritize software feature requests from your end users
- Use customer/partner portals to collect and prioritize product feedback from outside of your company
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Tags: ideas
I passed the developer exam a little over a month ago, and have finally gotten around to posting my notes. These notes can serve as a great supplement to the 401 podcast. The exam itself is pretty straightforward, more situation-based than the admin exam, and there is definitely overlapping subject matter between the two. Good luck! Drop me a line with any thoughts/comments.
Tags: Certified Developer
Here is a great introduction video to Content. From here, I want to focus on how to administer Content and address challenges you’ll face in your implementation.
Content is split between a number of different moving pieces:
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Tags: content
How can you translate text from a related list into a field on your master object?
Magic. Pure and simple. That, and formulas. Lots of formulas. We’ll call it Formula Magic.
This works by assigning each entry within the picklist to a range of digits, using a roll-up summary formula to compile the totals, and then using remainder calculations to determine type.
Here’s how to set it up:
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Tags: formula·master-detail relationship·picklist·roll-up·workflow
The ‘update’ function within the data loader does not allow you to specify an external ID. Well, as it turns out I needed to do just that.
The simple work-around is to simply not include a required field and then perform an upsert.
In my example, I was updating accounts via the external ID “OWNER ID”. By leaving out the “Name” field (required to create a new account record), I will get an error message instead of creating new accounts:

You could set a different field to required (checkbox on the field itself, not the page layout) in order to get the same functionality with the name field included. As always- if you are playing with data in a production org, test with a small batch before you load up the big guns!
Tags: update·upsert