AppExchange Review Series

As a long time Salesforce partner (since 2008), on both the consulting and AppExchange side, we realized we have a wealth of experience in building, installing, configuring, and using AppExchange apps. Our consulting customers often come to us with questions about which app would solve a particular problem, and as part of our AppExchange business we are often trying apps to learn what to do (and not to do) when building our own.

5 Hottest Updates in Salesforce Summer '24 for Admins

Salesforce has 3 major releases every year: Spring, Summer, and Winter. The Summer 24 release is rolling out in 3 stages: May 17th, June 7th, and June 14th, respectively. Sandboxes will be updated on May 10, but if you want to get hands-on early, you can sign up for a preview org by following the link below. Getting to the good stuff, there are some major quality-of-life updates for Admins, features like the automation app, Einstein for Flow, Field tracking history, personal labels, and improved permission set interfaces, to highlight a few.

Product Launch: CloudAnswers Shop Builder

Are you looking for an easy way to launch an ecommerce shop? Our new app, Shop Builder, is now in public beta! We’re looking for companies that want to build an online shop but don’t want to spend thousands building it out.

Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Developer

Interested in becoming a Salesforce developer? In this blog post Jagmohan has put together his favorite tips and resources to get started in the world of Salesforce development.

A Day in the Life of a Project Manager at CloudAnswers

I'm Emily, and I've been a project manager at CloudAnswers for the last two years. It can be a nebulous role, but I like to say I act as a bridge between the product vision and tangible results, whether that is building a custom app for a client or one of our own Salesforce products. My typical day revolves around managing tasks, ensuring progress, and maintaining standards while adhering to project timelines.

Create a Custom Lightning Component for Alert and Confirm Dialogs

As front-end developers, there can be numerous instances when we need to display a prompt, a confirm dialog, or a confirm dialog with some input control to accept some value from the user. If you happen to be a Salesforce developer reading this article, you must have had such a requirement while writing lightning components.

5 Northeast Dreamin’ Sessions Admins You Don’t Want to Miss

Northeast Dreamin’ is the premier Salesforce User conference in the Northeastern United States and happens annually in New Hampshire. If you’re not familiar, Dreamin’ events are small regional Salesforce conferences that take place around the world. So you would expect informative sessions, but I wa

SF Admin 1 Year Blog post

It’s been one year since I started working as a Salesforce administrator, and I have learned a lot. From getting a solid grasp on Flow to learning how to use SOQL queries or even the simplest formulas in Excel. My perspective is unique since I work as a consultant, meaning I work with many different

Creating a Custom Component to Update Experience Cloud Profile Photos

Are you looking for a lightning component to set or update a community user’s profile photo? If yes, please read this article for a guide that makes it simple. A profile photo adds a personal touch to the profile and helps others easily identify the person behind the profile. In the context of profe

When and how should I use entry criteria VS decision elements in Flows? #admins

Both entry criteria and decision elements are great ways to filter records down to get exactly what you need, but there is a time and place for each. First, let’s take a look at their strengths and limitations. Then we’ll dive into how and why to use each with a business problem that is solved by us

How to ensure your team’s work passes UAT

Getting stopped in your tracks by not passing User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is rough. All that hard work only to run into a bug or find that your solution doesn’t actually fit the needs of the client. These things are bound to happen sometimes, but if it’s a regular occurrence, it can mess with your

Salesforce Admins: Make QR Codes and Barcodes in Salesforce

Unlock the power of QR codes and barcodes (aka zebra codes) in Salesforce. Add them to your page layouts, email templates, communities (aka experience cloud), portals, and printed templates. This can be accomplished by a junior admin with a simple formula field — no code required. Read more if you w

Sidestep the 2000 record limit in server-side pagination using Apex

Have you ever tried implementing server-side pagination using Apex with Salesforce SOQL limit and offset clauses? If yes, then you might already know that Salesforce SOQL doesn’t support offset values more than 2000. That means you can’t load more than 2000 records even if they are spread across mul

Extending React Data Table’s Functionality with Custom Components

At CloudAnswers, we use the react-data-table-component for managing data in tables. It is quite good when it comes to pagination, sorting, and other important features. However, there were missing features in the original component, so we decided to add some func

5 Northeast Dreamin’ Sessions Admins Don’t Want to Miss

Open Source Updates — Friday Oct 6, 2022 Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash As developers, we often see the same problem through multiple projects. When time permits we like encapsulate the reusable code into an app and/or github repo so we and other developers don’t have to go through the same work

What is Salesforce DevOps and how does it impact your organization?

Lets begin with 'DevOps' definition. It is a collection of practices that integrate software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to help teams produce, test, and deliver software faster and more reliably. Think of developer operations like you think about sales operations, or marketing operations - it’s the tools and processes that enable the department’s work. Since its inception in 2009, the word "DevOps" has been used to describe a combination of cultural ideas, practices, and tools that strive to shorten the development life cycle and improve software quality.

Salesforce Lead Nurture Campaigns

Lead nurturing is all about discovering what your customers value and then offering it to them in an automated fashion and watching their behavior to see when they are ready to purchase or get involved with sales. Lead nurturing includes identifying their needs and giving value to potential customers throughout their interactions with your organization. That is encouraging leads to stay in touch until they are ready to take the next step

Tips for Becoming a Salesforce Admin

Before starting my career as a Salesforce administrator, I had never even heard of Salesforce. I was just some kid who went to a trade school and worked at Best Buy. One day my dad had told me about this software that he was working with called Salesforce. He told me how you didn't need a college degree, no schooling. All you needed was the dedication to learning the software and $200 to pass the exam.

Sales Activity Reports in Salesforce

Reporting on Sales Activity can be frustrating due to the complexity of capturing and reporting on all the different things going on, but being able to find the pulse of your sales team is priceless. We hope these ideas have inspired you to create some powerful reports. If you have any questions, feel free to start a chat with us - it's on this page to the lower right!

How to build a Customer Churn Rate report in Salesforce

The churn rate is the total percentage of customers that join up and subsequently leave within a specific period. The churn rate is undesirable since it indicates that you're losing consumers. Customer churn rates may be divided into two categories: voluntary and involuntary. People who unsubscribe for their reasons, such as being dissatisfied with the service or no longer requiring it, are referred to as "voluntary churn." Involuntary churn can occur due to problems like payment failure that cannot be attributed to a customer intentionally canceling.

The hidden costs of duplicates in Salesforce

A company's future success depends on making data-informed decisions quickly and effectively. Companies that don't follow these practices may be at a disadvantage. According to reports, poor data management costs organizations an estimated $3.1 trillion in the United States yearly.

Duplicate Records in Salesforce

Maintaining a CRM system with accurate data is critical for any business to succeed. Removing duplicates records in Salesforce is one of the easier ways to improve data quality. For those just getting started with duplicate management, start with setting up Duplicate Rules and Matching Rules to prevent or identify duplicates, then figure out a plan to merge them and keep it clean moving forward.

Designing User Security and Visibility in Salesforce

Trust and security are at the top of Salesforce's priority list. The platform has everything you need if you're looking to construct a robust user security paradigm. However, this security approach has flaws that an attacker can exploit to gain access to your data. The Salesforce Architect has the duty to ensure that these features are set up correctly.

Creating automated reports in Salesforce

Creating automated reports in salesforce. Schedule and send reports to non-salesforce users, to any email, in Excel format.

The truth about duplicates in Salesforce

How do I manage duplicates in Salesforce? Duplicate records in your database are inescapable - between list imports, employees entering data, and all the automated inbound sources, there will inevitably be duplicate records. It is critical to have a plan to evaluate and correct these duplicates regularly. Salesforce duplicate management offers built-in capabilities to help users avoid entering the same data across several devices or sources. Salesforce's duplication management rules assist in discovering possible duplicate records across accounts (business and person), contacts, leads, and custom object records.

Does reporting really matter?

What are the benefits of reporting? Business reports provide essential information to management, such as spending, profit, and growth. Reports deliver valuable information that the business can utilize to generate future predictions, marketing plans, assist budget planning, and improve decision-making.

How to coordinate marketing and sales by avoiding duplicates in Salesforce

If you are in charge of handling client data, you have almost certainly dealt with the hassles that duplicate data causes. Whether the duplicate data entered your system due to clients filling out forms, manually inputting data, or importing it from other platforms, the implications are the same and highly expensive.

How to edit the Opportunity Team in Salesforce?

An Opportunity Team is precisely what it sounds like: a group of individuals working together on a single opportunity. It gives you 100% control over who is working on what contact/deal/transaction and their responsibilities.

Flows vs Workflows vs Process Builder - Process Automation in Salesforce

Historically, providing a smooth customer experience has been difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating with manual procedures and disparate systems. However, with a 360 degree view of the customer and a bit of automation, it is all easier. This article discusses process automation in Salesforce, how it can help businesses, and actionable tips.

Salesforce Marketing Intelligence Report - Key Insights.

Without question, turning to data to help develop and maintain businesses is vital. Intelligent data is the lifeline and facilitator of success, whether it’s reacting to changing consumer behavior during and after the COVID-19 epidemic...

Salesforce custom report types - what are they, when are they useful

Reporting on your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data can give you real-time data-driven insights into your business

Marketing campaigns - how to plan, execute and report

Marketing is about establishing objectives and delivering tangible outcomes, not simply flashy advertising and amusing commercials. A campaign may provide quantifiable indications of such results, but only if it is well-designed. The initial step is to define a set of objectives.

How to get Salesforce data into CSV or Excel files

Salesforce is a customizable multipurpose CRM platform that millions of users use to handle complicated company operations, improve sales, customer care, marketing, etc.

Batch Apex Error Event - CloudAnswers Hackathon

A hackathon is an event usually put together by a tech organization. The event brings programmers together over a specific period to collaborate on a project.

Tips for effective online sales

Technology has changed the approach to daily living. One of the main areas it has significantly impacted is e-commerce across the globe.

Improving your Sales strategy during a pandemic

Currently, businesses have settled into the reality of virtual meetings, remote work, online marketing, and other remote approaches to getting work done at a distance. The fact is that Covid-19 changed the whole world.

Getting familiar with Salesforce dashboards

Salesforce dashboard visually provides information- quickly and easily. Dashboards can be created for anything that you are tracking in Salesforce. They can be customized for different business units or job roles. I

Hackathon Highlights: Shipment Scanner

Hackathon Highlights: Shipment Scanner. new API for barcode scanning in Lightning Web Components combined with a third-party library for generating QR codes to create a better way to generate shipping labels and receive packages.

Salesforce reports can help your business

A Salesforce report is a document that contains organized data from Salesforce. Salesforce has several options for formatting tabular data within the report. Reports can include charts, graphs that summarize the report data.

Save DOM Element As Image Attachment In Salesforce

Use a dom-to-image Javascript library that can turn arbitrary DOM nodes into a vector (SVG) or raster (PNG or JPEG) image in Salesforce.

How and Why We Run Hackathons

CloudAnswers team every month or two, run 24-hour hackathons. They have been a big success: we have received great feedback from the team, launched several products, solved customer problems and our own. So we thought we’d share why and how we run these.

How to create a working marketing calendar in Salesforce for your business

A marketing calendar is a written blueprint that keeps your marketing activities on track. With one, it is easier to organize, visualize, and execute your activities. Consequently, it is an actionable tool that works towards achieving goals over a stipulated period.

Embed Image In Conga Document Using Salesforce ID

Learn how you can embed an image uploaded as a Salesforce Attachment in a Conga Document. Use the Conga IMAGE tag you can embed images.

Top reasons Why you should use Salesforce for your business?

Salesforce for business is cloud-based CRM software, with standalone applications for sales, customer service, and marketing.

Salesforce Power Admin

Salesforce Admin is the captain for maintaining the business structure and data quality, helping users develop reports, adding fields, running backups.

Hack Test.loadData() to accept relational data

Deploy a Hasura GraphQL API for Salesforce in minutes

Salesforce API limits can stop you from using Salesforce data. Get around that, by using open-source Hasura GraphQL API for Salesforce.

Avoid the Salesforce Data Storage Limit

Use the free Google Drive and liberate your files in Salesforce by an CloudAnswers Google Drive Integration App. Avoid salesforce data storage limit.

Salesforce Lightning components overview

What is Salesforce Lightning? Salesforce Lightning is a component-based framework for app development from Salesforce.com that is designed to simplify processes for business users, who typically do not have programming experience.Lightning contains a set of tools and technologies behind a significant upgrade to the Salesforce1 Platform (formal App Cloud), which is the Salesforce mobile app development platform.

Custom domains and free SSL on Force.com Sites

You are using a force.com site with a custom domain, but browsers are now preferring SSL (https) and users might even be warned if they visit your force.com site if it doesn’t use SSL. Built a custom domain and free SSL on Force.com - in this article we show you how

Effective data storage in Salesforce for every business size

In today’s digital times, the growth and the future of organizations are highly dependent on their policy to collect, store, retain, access, and use data. What’s more, this enormous volume of data is coming with plenty of challenges like high storage costs, reduced application performance, quality issues, but also security and scalability.Sometimes, when working with Salesforce, the amount of data may grow too big. And for this reason, you have to come up with the right ways to handle such numbers of data, to avoid a degradation in Salesforce performance by optimizing Salesforce data storage.

Build Fast Static Sites with Salesforce and Netlify

Learn how to get your data from Salesforce into your epicly fast jamstack sites. and see common patterns for quickly extracting key data from salesforce without adding too much complexity and maintenance overheadhow to build your own CMS for dynamic sites using records in salesforce.

Run Salesforce Reports in Apex

How to describe Salesforce reports in Apex? How to change report filter values through Apex? How to run reports to get data in Apex? Meet the answers in our article

How to calculate ARR and MRR

How to calculate Annual Recurring Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue with Salesforce Data. Focuse on the reports be easily pulled and calculated in Salesforce.

7 Popular Reporting Apps for Salesforce

Since always proper reports have been a regular source of confusion among sales and marketing reps for as long as the customer relationship management software has been in praxis. Many teams who use the software to track their sales opportunities and activities have ranted about the numerous difficulties in producing reports from their Salesforce sales and marketing data. Let us introduce you the most popular Salesforce reporting apps.

Top 10 Salesforce apps of 2020

Businesses use the Salesforce AppExchange to research, download and install apps that can help better run their businesses. Check the list of ten best reporting apps for Salesforce.

Why business owners should know AppExchange?

Business owners, who implemented the Salesforce solution, should be familiar with the AppExchange. Marketplace products and services help organizations configure their CRMs to fit their business needs. And AppExchange is more than business apps only. You can find components, consulting partners, and developers to help you extend the power of Salesforce and run your business with apps.

What operational metrics should you measure?

Operational metrics are key performance indicators that display a measurable value that shows what's going on in the business in real-time.

Salesforce - Reporting Tips and Best Practices

Reports are needed to understand the data you have in Salesforce or any other CRM. But how the report should be built might be challenging.

Waterbury PAL, nonprofit organization, helps more children with Salesforce

Salesforce’s nonprofit success pack allows PAL organization, whose goal is to help kids, to reach their full potential as productive, responsible citizens.

How To Make Your Salesforce Reports Run Faster

Get some some known tips and tricks which can make your Salesforce reports run faster. Most reports load in a matter of seconds.

10 CRM metrics you should measure

Customer relationship management, is necessary for enhancing the customer’s experience. Meet the 10 CRM metrics you should measure.

Avoiding Salesforce Report Subscription Limitations

Report Sending limitations in Salesforce. Find out how to walk around Salesforce Report Subscription Limitations. Challenges in reporting.

Load test builds in expo

GDPR can turn into an opportunity

GDPR can be a real opportunity for you. To be upfront competitors and building trust amongst your customers, update your website to comply the regulations.

Why you should use a marketing calendar

Read about the benefits of using a marketing calendar and how to get started. Get some free templates to start right away.

Sales Cycle Lengths

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - Sales Cycle Lengths. Opportunity age can be quickly calculated as days between CreatedDate and CloseDate.

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - find holes in your funnel

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated. Find holes in your funnel and improve your sales engine by using the right tools.

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - new opportunities

Learn how to get the right KPIs out of Salesforce. Get to know everything about the top of the funnel health and use it to...

5 tricks to accelerate business with emailed reports using Report Sender

The top 5 tricks to accelerate business with emailed reports using Report Sender. #1 Disseminate Product Updates to Partners...

Winners of the First CloudAnswers Open Hackathon

CloudAnswers open hackathon happens on a monthly basis. Teams are challenged to build apps that are related to Salesforce

How to use Lightning Components in Flows

How to use Lightning Components in Flows? A flow is an application usually built by Salesforce administrators.

Salesforce Big Objects

Salesforce big objects allow you to store and manage a massive amount of data on the Salesforce platform.It provides a consistent performance

Using Promises in Lightning

Salesforce introduced Lightning platform a co...

Track first response time on Cases using Entitlements

When working with Cases in Salesforce, a comm...

Quotes and Opportunity Line Items - Add a Trigger to Sync Custom Fields

Background: Quotes in Salesforce represe...

Replace Code with Flows

In Salesforce, Flow is a tool that can show screens to users, ask questions, and process their input. A common use case is scripting calls for support agents. %

lightning:outputField rendering issue when using with lightning:recordViewForm

**Background:** lightning:outputField is the...

Stream logs to CLI with apex:log:tail

Salesforce DX is a new set of tools that stre...

CPQ Custom Quote Lines

Who is this for: Salesforce CPQ develope...

Modify CPQ PDF Header and Footer

The Salesforce CPQ Header and Footer might wo...

Spring 18 Lightning Experience Highlights

Salesforce's Release Notes for Lightning Expe...

Lead Rotator Added to PowerPack

#### Lead Rotator added to PowerPack Cloudan...

Case Merge Added to PowerPack

Case Merge added to PowerPack <iframe s...

Lightning and JavaScript Buttons

Lightning is coming. You have played around w...

Must Do - Trailhead: Reporting

Salesforce is a lot of things. You can store ...

Spring '17 Developer Preview

Salesforce's Spring '17 release is coming soo...

Announcing PowerPack AppExchange App

When you have worked in over 100 orgs you get...

The four technical supplements that will help your email open rates reach peak performance

Email: The easiest way to either a high marke...

Out of aspirin? Reduce headaches with these 5 CRM software Best Practices

We’re not recommending that you can replace a...

Lead Nurturing Checklist

You operate or work within a medium-sized bus...