Over the weekend, salesforce.com prepared sandboxes on some servers to be upgraded to Spring ‘10. The actual upgrade on the sandboxes will go live on January 22, but if you don’t want your sandbox to be upgraded during the sneak-peak period, now is the time to refresh your sandbox to keep it on Winter ‘10.
All of this is a little confusing so checkout the details here
I use Maps a lot when I write code, usually to help me reduce the number of times I have to do queries. Normally they work just fine and I don’t pay attention to the little details like the case of the text used in its keys. The other day though, I was getting some really weird results from my code. The code was being used to dedupe incoming records against existing ones. I started by compiling the unique IDs for the new records, then queried existing records with the same ids, and then created a map of the Unique Id to existing record. Pretty straightforward simple stuff, right.
Well, for some reason my code didn’t work for one record. Since it was one record I knew it had to be data related, but a quick glance at the new record and the existing one didn’t yield any differences. A more thorough glance though revealed one letter that was lowercase where it should’ve been uppercase. It didn’t seem like that could be the problem, after all, text == TEXT results in TRUE. Well, it turns out that map.containsKey() is case sensitive and there’s no attribute that can be set to change this.
The solution is pretty simple, before putting a key into the map you use either string.touppercase() or string.tolowercase() to standardize the keys. Then when you use map.containsKey(), you use the same method to standardize the string you’re looking for.
After figuring this out myself, I found a post about it over at The Silver Lining. Sure wish it were in the developer docs!
The Los Angeles salesforce.com user group will be meeting on January 20, 2010 in Santa Monica. Mark Whiteside of AppExtremes will demonstrate their Conga Merge product. There will also be a demo of the salesforce chatter and Twitter/Facebook integrations.
January 20th Wednesday
3:45pm-5:45pm
(an earlier start time per members request)
Daily Grill
2501 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica 310.309.2170
*Validated parking underground
More details here.
Salesforce.com is hosting a webinar on January 14, 2010 10:00 a.m. PST titled “Can one app change the world?”. It’s a showcase of a customer named “Renewable Choice Energy” and how they use Force.com. Here’s the official description and registration link:
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:
What features were used to create this app
How to track your company’s carbon footprint
Where to find more planet-friendly apps
What else is possible with Force.com
Make an impact on your world. Learn how to create powerful apps on the Force.com platform.
Salesforce.com is hosting two webinars to present the new features in the Spring ‘10 release. The webinars take place on January 19 at 10:00 a.m. PST and 8:30 p.m. PST. It looks like the webinar will be two hours long and broken up into two parts.
Part 1 : Custom Cloud – Learn how many new Force.com features, including Multilevel Master-Detail Relationships and Rich Text Areas, can help you build richer applications, faster (1st hour).
Part 2 : Sales & Service Cloud – Discover how new features in Salesforce CRM, including Salesforce Automation, Salesforce Knowledge and Salesforce Answers, can help transform the way you interact with customers and partners (2nd hour
You can register at www.developerforce.com
Glenn Elliot at Myriad Minds posted a great short list of four tips to improve user adoption in salesforce.com.
Check it out at their website: www.myriadminds.com.au
What are your tips for improving user adoption? Let us know in the comments.
Over the long weekend, my facebook account got hijacked. I don’t know how but I’m just thankful that it was only my facebook account and that the damage was minimal (annoying emails to friends). These types of things are a good reminder to set a good password policy for salesforce.com and any other SaaS systems you administer.
You can update your org’s password settings by clicking on Setup | Security Controls | Password Policies. Determining the right password policy is always a trade off between ease of use and security. You don’t want to make it so complex that your users have to call for help every time they try to login, but you also don’t want to let your users use their birthday as their password (or worse, their luggage combination: 12345). There are many tips and tools out there to help generate secure passwords.
If your users seem to struggle with the issue, don’t worry. Salesforce will be releasing some new single sign-on features later this year that should help you out.
Do you have a nightmare story about an account being hacked/hijacked? Share it in the comments.