Wow, what a year! It had a lot of low points but as a wise person once told me, “In the wheel of fortune that is life, when you’re at the bottom, you have no where to go but up!” We here at MK Partners are happy to be ending this year with a positive outlook for 2010.
Happy new year everyone.
At this point, you should have received a dozen emails from salesforce.com about the changes to Opportunity Save Behavior. For most customers there will be no impact. However, if you have code or rules that involve Opportunities and their child records then you should probably keep reading.
The new change will treat a save to a child of an Opportunity as a save to the Opportunity itself. This means that if you add a new Line Item to an Opportunity, the Opportunity itself will be evaluated against validation rules, workflow rules, and triggers. On the surface this doesn’t seem like an issue. However, if you have old data that is incomplete and more recently created rules/triggers then you might get a headache the next time you do any mass data updates. For example, let’s say in June you added a validation rule on Opportunities that requires the Type field to be populated if the Stage equals “Closed Won”. That means that Opportunities older than June may not have the Type field populated. Now let’s say you want to mass update Opportunity Line Items switching out an old product with a new one. The changes for Line Items of an Opportunity with no value in the Type field will error out!
So what does this all mean? It means anytime you create a new rule/trigger you should also update your existing data to conform to it, which is a best practice anyway. It enables better reporting and prevents little headaches like this from happening.
Have you been affected by this new change? Let us know how in the comments.
GrandCentral’s site is officially closing its doors on December 31, 2009. For those of you that don’t know, GrandCentral was the precursor to Google Voice (our favorite voice-mail service). Google acquired the startup and quickly started switching users over to their branded version of the service. No one is really sure how Google plans on monetizing the service, but they keep adding more features and also recently acquired softphone service provider Gizmo5.
If you haven’t started using Google Voice yet, then we recommend you start right away. Not only will you save time by reading transcriptions of your voice-mail but you’ll save money too by not having to pay for unwanted calls.
Hopefully, you already know that s-Controls are being phased out at the end of 2009. Most of us haven’t worked with s-Controls, since Apex was released. With Apex and VisualForce, there’s very little that can’t be done in salesforce.com that we used to do with s-Controls.
The few things that are hard to do can usually be accomplished by using a custom button/link to run some javascript and then some javascript first then pass it off to Apex/VisualForce. A good example of this is a custom button on a related list. With s-Controls we could pass which records had the checkbox checked in the related list. When VisualForce came out, we lost this ability and forced the user to navigate to an additional page with the same list and check the boxes there.
There is a javascript workaround though, it involves having the custom button on the related list run some code that looks like this:
{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/17.0/connection.js")}
{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/17.0/apex.js")}
var records = {!GETRECORDIDS($ObjectType.Lead)};
if ( records.length > 0 )
{
var success = sforce.apex.execute("ApexClassName" , "ApexMethodName",
{
listIds:records
}
);
window.location.href=window.location.href;
}
else
{
alert('Please select one or more records');
}
Have you migrated your s-Controls yet? (Don’t worry, your existing ones aren’t going anywhere yet, you just wont be able to create new ones).
Salesforce.com has announced the following new webinar in their Admin to Hero series:
Can one app change the world?
January 14, 2010 10:00 a.m. PST
How can you make a difference with cloud computing?
Listen in as Renewable Choice Energy explains how they built an app on Force.com that measures the carbon impact their employees have on the planet.
Join Tom, Blakely, and Sarah to learn:
Make an impact on your world. Learn how to create powerful apps on the Force.com platform.
If you’re not already addicted to Lifehacker, make it your new year’s resolution. The site is a must subscribe for anyone interested in being efficient regardless of where in your life or work you want to be efficient.
Kevin Purdy had a great post the other day about his five wishes for better webapps. I especially liked the part about walled gardens and how the ideal web apps let you get all your data out quickly and for free. For years, salesforce.com has offered free (weekly) data exports to its Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers and a one-time free export to all other customers.
Speaking of data exports, that’s another great new year’s resolution. Schedule salesforce.com to export your data once a week, not only will it provide you with peace of mind, but it’ll make it possible to restore data if you ever accidentally overwrite or delete something.
If you read our post on the upcoming Spring ’10 Sandbox Preview then you may have already guessed that salesforce.com will be performing some maintenance on the sandbox servers soon. Here are the dates and times that we know of so far.
As always you can find information about upcoming maintenance at trust.salesforce.com
Also, don’t forget that during the preview you may have problems deploying code from your sandbox to production as the two systems will technically be out of sync.
Taggart Matthiesen delivered an amazing tech talk last week on Batch Apex and Custom Settings functionality. Not only did he demonstrate some basic Batch Apex functionality but also gave some promising insight into the future of Apex (safeharbor applies of course).
Some of the big news items included:
Great job Taggart, thanks for the extremely informative and educational session.
The webinar was recorded, so you can check it out here if you missed it:
http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Tech_Talk:_Whats_New_in_Apex_Code
Let us know in the comments what you plan on using Batch Apex for!
According to a recent email from salesforce.com, the Spring ’10 Sandbox Preview Window is scheduled for January 22nd, 2010 through February 13th, 2010. Based on past years, this means that Spring ’10 will start going live on Friday February 13th, 2010. (I guess the developers at salesforce.com aren’t superstitious!)
To learn more about the Spring ’10 Sandbox Preview, visit the community site at:
http://sites.force.com/blogs/ideaView?c=09a30000000D9xo&id=087300000006sT7AAI
To learn more about the features targeted for Spring ’10, visit the IdeaExchange at:
http://sites.force.com/ideaexchange/ideaList?sort=popular&status=Coming%20in%20Spring%20’10
What upcoming features are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments.
Salesforce.com is bringing two sessions of their Admin to Hero event to Los Angeles on January 20, 2010. The sessions are being held in El Segundo, one at 9am and one at 1pm. Click here to register.
Our staff is overqualified to attend, so we’ll probably pass, but we recommend any new admins attend.
Have you already attended one of these roadshows? Tell us about your experience.