1. How Not to Be a Bad Admin
Brad Gross – Information Logistics
Jared Miller – Configero
Jeff Grosse – Appirio

2. How to be a Bad Admin
• Actually – stories and good ideas to improve are the purpose
of the session
• Learn from these mistakes
• We will talk about a few of them but…
• All ideas are here:
• https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1JZDUll7JbOOxFZyDWs
ISv3VP4TAnZA99q5oQ2oGFSpc

3. Your Hosts
Jeff Grosse – Appirio - @CRMFYI
Jared Miller – Configero - @JaredMiller
Brad Gross – Information Logistics - @imperialstout

4. Jared Miller
Senior Project Manager, Configero
@jaredemiller

5. How to be a Bad Admin
• Jared Miller
• Configero
• Co-Leader of the Tampa User Group
• Admin for a Professional Edition org for 3 years
• Working with Salesforce for over 6 years

6. How NOT to be a Bad Admin
• Creating date specific fields
• Customizing the “other” page layouts
• Point and Click doesn’t mean work only in Production

7. Creating Date Specific Fields
• Story
• Sales reps are required to conduct a quarterly business
review with their customers
• 10 Fields were created to capture relevant data from
these meetings
• What happened next…
• First time, the users overwrote the data – No history
• Second time the admin created 40 fields to cover the
next year

8. Creating Date Specific Fields
• Business requirement
• A date specific field can be used for many different
purposes
• September 2012 Revenue
• 2012 Yearly Review Notes
• Next Steps for 2013

9. Creating Date Specific Fields
• What are the downfalls?
• No historical data tracking
• Maybe there was an issue from Q1 that has now
been overwritten
• Field Limits
• 40 fields a year to capture the data
• Think of your page layout
• Think of your field limits

10. What Should We Do?
• The need to create specific date fields for a specific
purpose should prompt you to dig into the requirements to
determine if you need a Custom Object.
• Ask questions
• How many fields are needed?
• Is historical data important?
• Will the users/management/admin need to report on
the data?

11. What Should We Do?
• Solution
• Don’t be scared of a custom object!
• Create a custom object named – Quarterly Review
• Add the needed fields to this object, not the Account
• Why this worked
• Users clicked on “New Quarterly Review” button
• Historical data is kept
• Your page layout thanks you!

12. Customizing the “Other” Page Layouts
• Story
• Users need to find the information they need quickly,
with few clicks on the records and using searches
• Create formula fields to pull information from a related
object
• What happened next…
• Page layout was too long
• Users weren’t finding the information quick enough

13. Customizing the “Other” Page Layouts
• What are the “other” page layouts?
• Mini-Page Layouts
• Controlled at the page layout level
• This is how you customize the hover box

14. Customizing the Mini Page Layout
We already know the
account name! Information I can do
something with (and
no clicks)!

15. Customizing the “Other” Page Layouts
• What are the “other” page layouts?
• Search Layouts
• Controlled at the object level
• You can add up to 10 fields
• You can’t add long text fields
• Formula fields are not available

16. Customizing the Search Layouts
• Setup>Customize>Object>Search Layouts>

17. All about
ButtonClick Admin a Salesforce blog that is all about solving
problems with Clicks and Not Code. New posts are published every
Monday morning at 10 AM CST.
 We love Salesforce.com because of its usabilitiy
 We solve problems with clicks, not code.
 We work hard everyday to ‘make Salesforce go’ for our company.
 We refuse to say NO when asked “Can Salesforce do that?”
 We are dedicated to being successful!

18. ButtonClickAdmin is more than just
my voice, there are dozens of guest
It's more than a blog, posts written by Salesforce
it's a community. Administrators just like you. Many of
these Guest Posts are written by
Salesforce MVPs and are some of the
most popular posts.
Mike Gerholdt, Blogger-in-Chief

19. Point and Click doesn’t mean work in Production
• Story
• New ideas are always coming to us
• Salesforce is releasing new functionality that may solve
a business need
• What happened next…
• New workflow rules, validation rules, custom objects,
custom fields are added into production…

20. Use your sandbox!
• Just because we point and click doesn’t mean we aren’t
“developers”
• Your sandbox is a place to
• Learn new functionality
• Test your ideas
• Login As
• Not disturb users in production

21. Jeff Grosse
Consultant
@CRMFYI

22. Appirio Helps Enterprises Power Their Business with
Public Cloud Solutions
Helping Enterprises Become:
Efficient Effective Agile
Social Mobile
Technology-enabled professional services,
supported by 500 cloud experts and
a 50,000+ cloud developer community
5 years, 300 enterprises, 1.5M users moved to the cloud
22

23. How to be a Bad Admin
• Jeff Grosse
• Appirio
• Founder of the Twin Cities User Group
• Admin for two Enterprise Edition orgs totaling 6 years
• Working with Salesforce for over 7 years

24. How NOT to be a bad admin
• Sections
• Available for a reason
• Logical collection
• Don’t always need labels

25. Sections
• Spaces
• Watch for dead space
• Be aware of Field Level Security

26. How NOT to to be a bad admin
• Page Layouts
• What justifies new layouts?
• Functional views of core data
• Design it for them
• How they look at data
• How they gather data

27. Two Records – Two Layouts
Customer Layout
Partner Layout

28. How NOT to be a bad admin
• Data gathering – A story
• Customer wanted 32 points of data gathered over the
course of years, available easily on an Account
• Option 1
• 64 fields of data added to the page layout
• Option 2
• One new custom object and a related list that builds

29. How NOT to to be a bad admin
• Reporting and Dashboards
• The role of Field Level Security in usability
• Limits the ability to report on data
• Helps users find fields they’d actually use
• The role of Folder Security in usability
• Don’t show them what’s irrelevant to them

30. Brad Gross
Information Logistics

31. How to Not be a Bad Admin
• Plan Not React
• Everyone Needs to Nod Yes
• Get an Amen From the Congregation
• Data Entry May Not be Their Job
Stay “PEGD” on Good Salesforce Admin’ing

32. P - Plan Not React
• Salesforce is almost too • Think about:
easy to create • Objects
• Plan and think in • Fields
advance of doing • Workflow
• Views
• Does that belong there?
• Reports
• What should happen
• Dashboards
next when Y occurs?
• Validation Rules

33. E - Everyone Needs to Nod Yes
• Executive buy-in is crucial to salesforce.com success
• Tie their wallets (or bonuses) to the solution
• Have executives announce big news
• Its not YOUR system its EVERYONE’s system

34. G - Get an Amen From the Congregation
• Have regular team meetings
• Make the team aware of situations and successes
• Discuss and agree
• Let everyone march out and talk with all users
• Don’t be a lone gunman

35. D - Data Entry May Not be Their Job
• User’s job may be worth more then all the data
• Pick your battles wisely on new fields
• Use scheduled reports/dashboards
• The 2-minute task

36. Brad Gross Jared Miller Jeff Grosse
@imperialstout @jaredmiller @CRMFYI