SalesForce

Every year Salesforce makes three new releases at regular intervals i.e. the summer, winter, and spring. This year, Salesforce summer release which was scheduled to be released in the month of May 2020 got delayed due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic and has now been released in June. In this article, we will take a look at some of the standard new features offered by the new release. To know more about the releases, it’s prudent to partner with a reliable Salesforce consultant. Trigger a Flow for Performing Actions: Every time a record is created or updated, the trigger of a Flow that can perform actions for e.g. sending an email after the changes are made to the database. The record-changed flows can be used to make before-save updates and after-save actions. You can replace processes and also make changes in the processes that were created in the process builder Run Flows that Evade User Permission: This feature allows guest users to produce or edit records that they don’t have access to by fixing your flow to run without sharing. Within such a setting, the flows running ignore the field and object-level security, default settings, rule sharing, teams, manual sharing, and territories. Properly Manage Community Pages: With an improved community page Menu, navigating to and editing your pages becomes easier. To see the folder where a page resides, it’s important to search for that page and select it from the search results. Work Item Status for Determining Agent Capacity: This feature helps in determining agent capacity more accurately basis the status of work accepted rather than earlier methods of using open tabs. The tasks allocated to agents continue to remain assigned and reflected even when they are unavailable until the time the task is reassigned or completed. Debug faster and more Flows: The need for manually reverting changes made to the database when you debug an auto-launched flow is now no longer required. You can save yourself the trouble by using the rollback mode in Flow Builder. The debug option in Flow Builder can be used as it includes the Lookup screen component allowing you to set record variables easily.  Conclusion: These are a few of the many Summer 20 release features. If you too are looking to implement any of the summer ’20 Release features, you must consider partnering with a Salesforce implementation partner with extensive knowledge, in-depth experience, and proven results in achieving customer success.    

For almost 2 decades Salesforce users were using pre-built reports and dashboards to have a quick look at their data. But with time, data has increased exponentially and it has become quite difficult to manually look for the required data. Due to this very reason, Salesforce has launched Einstein Analytics, a platform that solves the challenge of gathering the required data at one place to answer key queries related to organization sales. What is Salesforce Einstein? Salesforce Einstein is Artificial Intelligence integrated into the Salesforce Platform which allows organizations to automate the reports, identify the needs within the workflows, and even the effectiveness of each sales team within the organization. It has transformed the way organizations used to analyze their data. Organizations can now track their KPI’s, annual reports, sales pipeline, etc. seamlessly by eliminating the dependence on mathematical models and algorithms. Salesforce Einstein’s artificial intelligence stage takes sales/revenue forecasting to the next level by providing new useful real-time insights depending on the real-time data coming in the system. It progressively adjusts itself to modifications and new information. It assures if there is any unexpected change in the market then it can rapidly change its forecast and predict according to the new requirements. Salesforce Einstein AI Impact on Business Sales Salesforce Einstein offers various features to provide a better insight into the sales. It has features like Activity Capture which automatically captures the data from various sources like emails, call logs and, salesforce chats and saves sales reps time from manual data entry. It even recommends good quality leads and opportunities to sales reps who can nurture them. Marketing For the marketing folks. it is a clear winner as it helps them with forecasting customer engagement, tracking social media engagement, launching email campaigns, etc. It even helps in transforming the organization image by suggesting suitable content. Customer Experience Salesforce Einstein has capabilities of enhancing customer experience by automatically extracting customer’s information and providing real-time insights about the customer like their pain points, requirements, etc. By having all the necessary information sales reps can nurture customers in the right direction. Commerce AI powered Salesforce Einstein guides organizations to sell the right products, provide special offers to customers at the right price and at the right time. This even helps organizations in selling and upselling services and products to the customers by tracking their previous purchase history. Key Features of Salesforce Einstein Voice Commands This feature enables you to perform various functions with a voice command. It does not just listen it even answers back in the same way. You can set-up meetings, get news updates of prospects, view dashboards, etc. by using the voice commands. Natural Language Processing (NLP) This feature enables Salesforce to understand what the users are trying to say in their emails and messages. It spots the keywords present in customer’s/prospects messages and suggests response accordingly. This reduces the time of reply, and customers/prospects will be addressed quickly. Action Oriented It automatically takes actions on things that sales reps might not have asked for like scheduling a follow-up call or a follow-up meeting with the customers. It self-analyses the meeting notes and takes appropriate actions that save a lot of sales reps time. Scoring With Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring, it looks into the insights of leads and opportunity, and based on the available information it scores the leads and opportunities. By looking at the score, sales reps can pick up those leads with a higher score to nurture first. Salesforce Einstein AI Benefits for Organizations Sales Pipeline Management One of the most important and useful advantages of Salesforce Einstein AI is its ability to keep on modifying/updating the pipeline on a real-time basis. It helps in evaluating trends in opportunities and provides a list of opportunities that can be closed with ease and those which require attention. By using it, organizations can focus on the right opportunities. Account Insights With Einstein Account tool, organizations can get the latest news related to financial results, mergers, and acquisitions, etc. for their prospects and customers. These insights can be leveraged by the sales teams and marketing teams to run personalized marketing messages and special offers for every prospect. This tool even captures information like the impact of the marketing campaign, clicks that come through campaigns, etc. The effectiveness of the campaign can be visualized on a dashboard where the organization sees the success rate of marketing and sales generated through it. Performance Analysis Organizations can use Salesforce Einstein to monitor the opportunities in the sales pipeline and the sales teams monitoring them. They can further compare the performance of every individual present in the sales teams over different parameters. Leader View Dashboard presents a top-notch view of sales rep performance over time. After analyzing the performance of every individual at various parameters organization and reward their top performers. Whitespace Analysis Whitespace analysis is the process of uncovering new opportunities. With the assistance of Salesforce Einstein, organizations can execute whitespace analysis and look out for new opportunities. Salesforce Einstein has the potential to recognize which product or service has been sold to which accounts and it further creates feasible opportunities depending on the account’s previous/current requirements. Conclusion Artificial Intelligence has an undeniable influence on all walks of life. In today’s world, an AI based platform, such as Salesforce Einstein, provides the best scenarios and retrospective to make the experience of selling process human-like which helps an organization in increasing sales and automate the process and prepare for the future market needs. About Girikon Girikon has become a reputed name in the IT services, as well as consulting space. Being one of the reputed providers of SaaS technologies like Salesforce, the company offers high-end Salesforce consulting and Salesforce implementation services.

All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics.  Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards. Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically. Einstein Analytics allows you to:                                                      Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter. Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery. Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps. Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS. Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards  Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates.  Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step.  How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce? If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus. Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher). All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics.  Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards. Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically. Einstein Analytics allows you to:                                                                Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter. Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery. Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps. Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS. Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards  Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates. Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step. How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce? If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus. Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher). All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics. Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards. Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically. Einstein Analytics allows you to:                         Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter. Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery. Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps. Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS. Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards  Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates. Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step. How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce? If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus. Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher). Conclusion Salesforce Einstein Analytics gives the power to harness raw data for real business solutions that make a huge difference. Salesforce customers report tells that Einstein Analytics has boosted their individual and team productivity levels, saving them an average of 10-11 hours per month per IT/sales/operations resource. And the longer they use Einstein Analytics, the more productivity continues to increase. If you wish to implement Einstein Analytics and avail the above-mentioned exciting benefits, you can consider partnering with a Salesforce implementation partner. About Girikon Girikon is a reputed IT consulting company with offices across the USA, UK, Australia, and India. Over the years the company has become one of the established players in the area of Salesforce consulting, Salesforce implementation and Salesforce support space.

Sales Analysis Provides Logical Answers to your Question For every organization, the sales function continues to be the most important function as it plays a significant role in building trust between a customer and a business entity. Organizations usually spend enormously in sales-related activities to gain edge over their competitors. However,  sales related business decisions taken on others advice or by own “gut feeling” could be quite risky that too when a large amount of money is at stake. Sales Analysis is the process which is used to understand, identify and predict sales trend. It leverages the historic data to determine the failure/success of the previous sales drive and helps in identifying the area of improvement. With sales analysis organizations no longer need to take decisions based on their gut feelings as it provides logical answers to their sales-related queries. Importance of Sales Analytics: There are several benefits of incorporating Sales Analytics into the Sales function. Let’s take a quick look at some of them. Fill the gaps: By Analyzing their available data, organizations can figure out where they may have missed out on the opportunity of converting a prospect to a customer. This will eventually help organizations fill the gaps in the sales process, as well as the gaps in their products. Organizations should analyze their product and understand what their competitors are doing to remain competitive, what’s not working for you and how can you fill in the gaps. Increase Retention Rate: If organizations can figure out why any deal got closed, then they can keep their customers happy and build a strong relationship with them. It is important to understand the need of the customers so that organizations can upsell and cross-sell other products to the existing customers, which significantly adds to the revenue. In addition, by looking at the purchasing patterns of your existing customers you can recommend what customers can buy next, based on what these customers have bought in the past. Accurate Sales Forecasting One of the most obvious and important feature of Sales Analysis is the ability to predict the future sales based on the available data. Unlike setting up goals based on the “gut feeling”, historic data gives you an accurate, realistic picture of how much your organization should be able to earn within a specified time period. Competitor Sales Analysis In industries like automobiles, sales made by all the organizations are made available on the public platforms. Organizations can use their competitor’s data to see which product of their competitor is selling the most. They can even get the answer to the question like where and why a particular competitor’s product is selling the most. Based on their analysis they can revamp their product lineup, product pricing, introduce new product etc. Future Decision Making Organizations can even make future decisions like whether an organization need to introduce new products or discontinue any existing product. It even help organizations effectively manage inventory, marketing activities, sales offer roll-out time, manufacturing process etc. More efficient Marketing Sales Analysis helps organizations identify market opportunities and trends to support product marketing. If an organization is planning to launch a new product then it is very important to know the answer of below questions When should the product be launched? Q2. Where should the organization launch the product? Q3. How should it be marketed? Q4. Who is the target audience? All the above questions can be answered by using sales analysis. By having answers to all the above question, organizations can launch their product at the right time and can target the right audience, which will help them have a good sales number. Type of Analysis Sales Analysis could be done in many different ways based on the available data with the organization. Common types of Sales Analysis performed are mentioned below: Product-wise Analysis Organizations can use product-wise analysis to identify which product is selling most and during which time of the year. For example, winter clothes are sold most between November – January whereas summer clothes are sold most between May – September. Based on this analysis, organization can manage the new product launch date, inventory etc. Forecast vs Achievement analysis With the help of Forecast Analysis, organizations can see whether they are able to meet their monthly/weekly/quarterly targets or not. They can even identify how much they should be looking for in the month/week/quarter. Based on their analysis they can make required changes in order to meet the desired organizational targets. Periodic Analysis Periodic sales analysis are the ones which help organizations compare two or more different time period sales. Organizations can analyze the data and see which decisions of the organization has helped them in boosting up the sales and which decisions have led to dip in sales. Conclusion To sum up, Sales Analysis is something which will help you identify the gaps not just in the organization’s sales process but even in other areas as well, like gaps in product, release of the product etc. It even provides a logical solution to fill the gaps in order to increase the sales and reduce the losses. It enables organizations to take decision based on the facts rather than on their “gut feeling”. On being leveraged appropriately, Sales Analytics can help organizations deal with all the roadblocks, which they might encounter during their Sales journey. About Girikon As a global provider of end-to-end IT services, Girikon boasts of a team of certified, and experienced Salesforce consultants, administrators and developers who have the knack for catering to the customer requirement in the most efficient way.

Businesses run on documents and trust. Conga Composer – a salesforce app automates the tedious business process and provides actionable insights, so that customers can focus on what matters. Conga composer- a robust Salesforce application allows businesses to create error-free, sophisticated and template digital documents directly from Salesforce that too within seconds. This leads to increased productivity and engaged customers. What is Conga Composer in Salesforce? Conga Composer is a Salesforce app which makes it easy for Salesforce users to create sophisticated documents and reports using any data in Salesforce with only a few clicks. It can automatically populate richly-formatted templates with data from any standard or custom object in Salesforce. By leveraging this app, organizations can allow end-users to make selections, such as which template to use for the final merged files, or can pre-select templates and other options and run the solution entirely in the background.  Its key features are: A separate conga license needs to be purchased for each user. Reports can be generated via button on page lay-out or link on the home page Conga reports can be created through S/F report or SQL queries Reports can be created in different formats: MS Word MS Excel MS PowerPoint PDF Email HTML Email Conga Composer can be leveraged to create sophisticated and accurate digital documents using pre-built templates and populated with data from Salesforce automatically. The tool also helps organizations send consistent and personalized documents that not just promotes their brand but also delights their customers. You can generate any document like: ✔ Quotes ✔ Proposals ✔ SOW (Statement of Work) ✔ Invoices/receipts ✔ Contracts ✔ Work orders ✔ Reports & charts ✔ And more! Why Integrate Conga Composer with Salesforce? Composer can use data from any Salesforces’ Standard or Custom Objects or even from external database and can directly populate into your document. It can generate documents in multiple formats as mentioned above. It creates customized, personalized, and on-time reports and documents with delivery-ease for every scenario. It can store documents wherever you want them to be kept. It can easily create accurate, consistent, pixel perfect documents. It can automate documents, presentation and reports. It is lightning ready You can fetch almost 50 other objects, additional data in Salesforce using Salesforce reports or SOQL queries. Users can create documents from their browser or mobile devices. Conga Composer allows multiple options for downloading, storing and delivering the documents: Downloaded immediately Saves directly in Salesforce or Google drive Emailed automatically Sent for E-signature  Conga Composer Technical Insights and Setup Considerations Conga Composer can be installed from Salesforce App Exchange but before that you need to Configure Composer as a Connected App, Enable Remote Sites, and Assign Licenses before building solutions. In order to install, you must have one of the below mentioned Salesforce editions: Performance/Unlimited Enterprise Professional Developer You can use Queries, as well as Salesforce reports to create the document. Conga queries contain a SOQL Select statement which is specially built to work in combination with Conga Composer and Conga Mail Merge. You can configure Conga Composer in a Sandbox: You can configure the SF instance so that if you later generate a Sandbox from the production, Conga automatically transfers the license information to the Sandbox. Note: Configuring Conga Composer Settings in a production instance will only affect new sandboxes, and does not have any influence on existing, refreshed sandboxes. It is lightning ready and for that we need to make sure that we are on the updated Conga version, else the Conga Composer using Salesforce reports will not work in Lightning experience. In that case we must replace Salesforce reports with Conga Queries as a data source for your Composer solutions. It is recommended that we replace all reports with queries as soon as possible. Conga Composer Add-ons and Extensions Apart from Composer, there are some add-on apps too using which you can extend the efficiency of Conga Composer. Conga Batch: Automating Document Generation at Scale Conga Batch or Conductor saves your time and effort when sending out your documents. You can consolidate, schedule and deliver the documents you create. You just need to choose how you want to launch and send, whether automatically or on-demand. It can consolidate up to 50 records or files for immediate download. Conga ActionGrid: Turning Salesforce Reports into Actionable Data Conga ActionGrid turns reports into actionable grids so that productivity can be increased, as well as user experience and user-adoption rates can be improved. Edit fields directly in Salesforce like you would in Excel and add records without opening additional forms Allows more advanced filtering It requires additional license like conductor Mass update up to 50 Million rows of data History tracking can be enabled Add information in bulk; copy and paste from a spreadsheet into Conga ActionGrid Create user-based controls and permissions so that the security can be maintained Conga Sign: eSignature Solution Native to Salesforce Conga Sign is an easy-to-use, modern eSignature solution built for Salesforce. It creates personalized documents in Salesforce delivers structured, templated communication to any eSignature signer-inside or outside of Salesforce Automates the contract experience with timely reminders, automated eSignature  Tracks the status of eSignature activity Conga Contracts: Salesforce-Based Contract Lifecycle Management Conga Contracts streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations so that the deals can be closed faster without leaving Salesforce. Simplify and accelerate the entire contract lifecycle Streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations Close deals faster with automated contract creation, controlled negotiations and streamlined reporting Effortlessly bridge the gap between CPQ and eSignature with an end-to-end solution Being built on Salesforce Lightning, it allows to be business-ready quicker than most CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) solutions in the market Wrap-up: How Conga Composer Improves Document Automation in Salesforce Using Conga Composer, you can deliver your documents in almost any format and by any method, and store those documents anywhere you want. You can provide your teams the power to create documents and reports whenever they need. You can automate the process, schedule documents or trigger to shorten business cycles. By getting rid of all the roadblocks, you can pave way for increased business efficiency, productivity and more happy customers. About Girikon Girikon – A reputed name in the IT service space offers Salesforce consulting and Salesforce implementation services to clients across different domains and industry verticals. As a Salesforce consulting partner, they follow industry best practices to deliver quality services and solutions.

Are you struggling to fit your migrated data into your target Salesforce environment? Is there a need for creating multiple fields? Don’t want to lose the data but don’t have the fields to migrate it to? If the answers to most or all of your questions is ‘yes’, then this article can help you achieve all the above without creating any new fields and without suffering any data loss. Where can you use this technique? Lack of fields on the Target as compared to the Source environment Data model does not match between the two environments Do not want to create new fields in the Target environment Do not have a separate custom object to hold the data Figure 1 Salesforce data model not matching How to achieve this? We will extract all the data from the source environment and insert it into the Description field of the Target environment using TALEND.  Assumptions We have migrated the data of Productsobject (OpportunityLineItem) from Source org.into a Description field (Special_Instruction__c) of Opportunity object in Target org. We are using Excel to extract data from Source environment and a Salesforce connection to push the data on the Target environment. We can also create a Salesforce connection for both the environments (Recommended way). Process Step 1: Create a Salesforce connection. For this you need 3 parameters: Username Password Security Token Figure 2 Create a Salesforce connection You need to enter all the credentials for the Source environment. Note:If you are connecting to a UAT environment be sure to change the URL in the tSalesforceConnection component. Step 2:In this step we need to extract the data from both the source files. Figure 3 Job Design in TALEND To achieve the above process first you need two files: Source File:In this file you need all the Product data (Opportunity Line Item data) along with the OpportunityId Target File:In this file you need the Opportunity Id from the Target Step 3:In this step we need to: Insert the two files into the tMap Apply an inner join between the two files. Concatenate all the product data into a single variable and add a null check to all the fields before inserting them into variables. Insert the variable into the Opportunity field. Figure 4 tMap Design in TALEND  In this method we have added “|” to separate the data you can choose another symbol as per your convenience. Note: Select the same selections in the tMap as highlighted above. Step 4: After all the description is concatenated add a tDenormalize to concatenate the records with the same Opportunity Id based on the Description field. Step 5:In this step use a tSalesforceOutput component to update the description field for the respective opportunity. Finally attaching the complete job for reference. More ways to implement the above approach: Extracting data from Salesforce rather than Excel Using other objects like Account, Contact etc. Pushing data into Salesforce with Excel Merging Product Data with Billing data Conclusion In a nutshell, we can say that whether your migration is for small or large data, you need to process your data in an efficient way. In your data migration journey, Talend can be your partner for ensuring hassle-free migration. About Girikon Girikon – a global provider of quality IT services houses a team of skilled Salesforce professionals including Salesforce consultants, administrators and developers.

Customers continue to be the most important assets for any organization and to ensure long-term relationship with your customers, it’s important to cater to their needs in the best possible way. One of the most effective ways of doing so, is to constantly upgrade your products and services, in a way that fulfils the evolving requirement of your customers. In other words, create new version of your products through new releases and upgrades. If you are leveraging the Salesforce platform, you will have to keep pace with all the upgrades that it keeps releasing time and again. What is Salesforce Upgrade? Salesforce releases new upgrade from time to time and to improve the performance, logic, and usability of your software, it is essential to upgrade it to the new version. Besides releasing regular upgrades that could be used to improve a products functionality and performance, Salesforce has illustrated seamless upgrades that are critical to customer success. Salesforce takes up to five minutes for upgrades and users will not see any difference when using the new Salesforce release. Changes with the new release will not activate by default and only salesforce admin can activate the new features using the Setup menu. What is the Impact on Interface? During the upgrade, our customizations are preserved, and Salesforce gives the same effects having the same consequences. During the upgrade, the Session Id is inactivated, and if any interface is running at that time, we’ll get ‘INVALID_SESSION_ID’ error. We cannot run our batches during the upgrade period, as the upgrade window can break our batch, we’ll have both valid and invalid data in our org. To manage this, what we need to do is: Monitor the validation/deployment results and check the post-deployment steps. If we need to run a batch after deployment checks the execution result of the batch. If it failed, we have to run it again. This has an impact on our scheduling (stop cascade batches and implement a retry every 30 minutes for example) We need to plan our batches after or before the upgrade period. We need to implement to run the same batch once again to continue the process without altering the data already processed. For a batch update to keep data consistency, we need to use transactions. It is native for batch Apex, but when using the API (custom development, ETL connector (i.e. TALEND, dataloader, etc.), we are not able to keep data integrity. The only way to keep it is by creating Apex Webservices that will be accessed by our batch. Is there any impact on Connected Users? During upgrade all the users need to invalidate their Session Idso that they are unable to connect the Salesforce until the upgrade process has finished. Users receive an error message letting them know that the service is unavailable during the upgrade and are prompted to log in again when the upgrade is complete. To manage this, we need to do: Share an upgrade timeline plan with all users so they know when you will upgrade, and how often Inform the user when they can log in into the system Share the new document, if any, if there is a change in the Salesforce UI/UX Best Practices to be followed If the Salesforce upgrade is not planned, there might be cases where end-users may not be able to access Salesforce after the completion of the update. In order to avoid unexpected service disruptions, we may need to take the following actions: 1) Enable “My Domain” NOTE: “My Domain” is required for customers who have requested the org migration. 2) Update the hard-coded references if any, for e.g. test-abc.salesforce.com and make sure to update them to the right URLs (for example, <yourdomain>.salesforce.com, abc.salesforce.com) prior to the org migration. Also, if there is any hardcoded Id in the code, make sure to update them dynamically. 3) If the Salesforce org has set up corporate network settings or any email security filters to restrict the access to only certain IP ranges, make sure to update the lists to include the newest ranges. You can whitelist the IP ranges in the Network Setting of Salesforce. 4) If there is an issue in integration following the maintenance, prepare to refresh integrations. Why to Upgrade and what are the benefits? Salesforce has the capability to work with earlier released features even if those features are supplanted by new functionality. Salesforce keeps all customers on a single version—i.e. the most recent version—of the product. Therefore, Salesforce provides the same experience, coolest Feature, advancement on compatibility and the latest bug fixes. Conclusion It is very much required to upgrade the Salesforce version to the latest release as it can eliminate the technical risks involved during the implementation. We understand that there could be a service disruption for couple of minutes but it is must have for your organisation since it could also increase your productivity. As we know that Change is the only Constant, hence we all must go with the flow and suggest the users/clients to upgrade to the newest version as soon as it is live. About Girikon:  Girikon is a Salesforce Consulting Partner, committed to deliver excellence by providing customers with wide array of quality services including Salesforce implementation, Salesforce consulting and Salesforce support.