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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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.

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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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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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!