[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] Streamline Project Management with Cloud Coach Milestones

This week's AppExchange hero is Brandi Johson, marketing consultant at Cloud Coach, who is going to present us Cloud Coach Milestones, the ideal tool for simple task and project management on the Salesforce platform.

Brandi Johnson is a marketing consultant and certified Salesforce admin. She focuses on helping clients create effective marketing strategies and leverage the right marketing technology to meet their unique business needs.

Cloud Coach specializes in enterprise-class project, PSA & PPM software built for businesses that want to make strategic investments in their success. With our unique four-tier approach to project management solutions, as your business grows, Cloud Coach can grow with you. Learn more at CloudCoach.com.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if everything you had to do at work was easy?
Then they may not have to call it work!
As businesses grow, the challenges they face get more complex - especially when it comes to working with your team to accomplish your goals.

One critical example of this is new customer onboarding.
Whether you’re in SaaS, professional services, or manufacturing, having a streamlined customer onboarding program is vital to your success.
A strong customer onboarding program helps you increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Plus, it reduces the stress on your team as they’re moving through the process.

Let’s take a look at Serenity Software - a B2B SaaS company. They’ve nailed their sales process leveraging Salesforce. But once a new customer signs on, the wheels start to come off the process. Emails fly back and forth between the account executive and customer support team trying to track down the details needed and sharing status updates.

The customer success manager keeps shared spreadsheets for each of the clients that they’re working with.

Unfortunately, the team isn’t great about keeping them up-to-date with status updates - leading, of course - to more emails.
They also tried using Trello to keep track of their projects, but they had the same problems: nobody wanted to log into yet another system to see what they needed to work on or post status updates.

Finally, the customer success manager discovered Cloud Coach Milestones in the Salesforce AppExchange. In minutes, she was able to start organizing her customer onboarding projects and increasing collaboration with her team.

She started by creating a template from the spreadsheet she had been using. It was easy to add additional details to each task using subtasks, and assign the work out to her team. Plus, Cloud Coach Milestones put everything into an easy-to-use Gantt chart so she can see at a glance how long everything each tasks takes, and when things are running behind.

Serenity Software took streamlining their projects a step further, and leveraged Salesforce Process Builder to automate their project creation.

Now, whenever an opportunity is marked as Closed-Won, a new project is automatically created leveraging the template the Customer Success Manager created.

Those new projects are automatically connected to the account, so everyone has a 360° view of the customer and the project while its in-progress.

With Cloud Coach Milestones, Serenity Software streamlined their project management processes.

They have happier clients, faster onboarding, and better team communication.

Since all of their projects are in Salesforce where they’re already managing the rest of their business, they can see all of their important business KPIs on centralized dashboards.

No data imports, no APIs.

Could Cloud Coach Milestones work for your business?

If you run projects, then yes, it could.

Plus, you can get started in less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Install Cloud Coach Milestones from the Salesforce AppExchange. Of course, we recommend installing into your Sandbox, not your production org.

Step 2: Check out the getting started videos. When you visit the Cloud Coach Milestones App, you’ll see a tab for “Getting Started.” These videos give you a great overview of Cloud Coach Milestones in action, and help you answer a ton of questions before they get asked.

Step 3: Create a project. Before you start sharing Cloud Coach Milestones with your team or customizing, I recommend that you build your own simple project. This helps you see how Cloud Coach Milestones works out of the box so you can make better choices about integration and customization.

Step 4: Customize your projects. Since Cloud Coach Milestones is built on the Salesforce platform, you can do a lot of customization on your projects to meet your business needs. For example, you may want a field to identify what type of project your team is doing for a client. Choices would be onboarding, maintenance, or special request. By adding a field on the project object, you can add this customization in minutes.

Step 5: Integrate with your existing objects and processes. Out of the box, Cloud Coach Milestones has lookup relationships to Opportunities, Accounts, Cases, and Campaigns. To associate projects with another object (custom or standard), create a new custom lookup field that points to the Cloud Coach Milestones object. Then, add the Milestones related list the page layout, and any projects you launch from that list will be visible on the project.

With Process Builder, you can automatically create projects from your business best-practice templates. The Cloud Coach Milestones Knowledge Base has details on how to autocreate projects with Cloud Coach Milestones and lots more.

Step 6: Assign permission sets to the users that need access to Cloud Coach Milestones. There is no limit to the number of users within your org who can use Milestones. Just like everything else about Cloud Coach Milestones, security was designed with simplicity in mind. There are only two permission sets you need to work with:

• CCMI | Minimum User Permissions – grants a user access to all standard Milestones functionality and views. A user with this permission set assigned can create their own projects, view projects that aren’t their own, and manage their tasks and projects.
• CCMI | Admin Permissions – permits exactly the same functionality but also includes the ability to load sample data. This is useful for Partners or Users who need to demo or test the product but do not want to spend time creating sample projects.
  

You’re never alone when you’re working with Cloud Coach Milestones. In addition to the extensive knowledge base that’s growing every week, we offer a free 30-minute onboarding consultation for new installs, and weekly open forum webinars to answer your questions.

Ready to get started with Cloud Coach Milestones? Just head over to the Salesforce AppExchange and click “Get It Now” to get started!

And it's available on Salesforce Lightning and Classic!

[Salesforce / Amazon Echo] AlexForce 2.0: integrate Salesforce and Alexa (the ultimate Apex library)

More than 2 years ago I wrote about a library I made up for integrating Salesforce and Amazon Echo, using its REST APIs and Apex: this is the original post.

I supported the library for a while hoping that the Ohana could took ownership of it but unfortunately this didn't happened.

With great surprise I met the next guest blogger, Harm Korten, who was developing his own version of the AlexaForce library.

I'm more than happy to give him place to his amazing library and hope that the time is now ripe to bring this library to the big audience!

Harm Korten is a Force.com fan from The Netherlands. His professional career in IT started in 2001 as a developer, but his interest in computers started well before that. He got introduced to Salesforce in 2005, working at one of the
first Dutch Salesforce.com partners, Vivens. He has been a Salesforce fan and advocate ever since.
Over the years, he has worked on countless Salesforce projects, at dozens of Salesforce end-user customers. Currently he is active at Appsolutely, a Dutch Salesforce partner, founded in 2017.
Find him on LinkedIn or follow his Salesforce (and other) adventures on his blog at harmkorten.nl.

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Introduction

In the first week of 2018, I ran into some of Enrico Murru’s work. Google offered his AlexaForce Git Repo (https://github.com/enreeco/alexa-force) as a suggestion to one of my many questions about integrating Amazon Alexa (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa) with Salesforce. It turned out Enrico had been working on this same thing, using the same technology stack, as I was at this moment.

An Alexa Skill SDK in APEX, only 2 years earlier!

Nerd reference
Up until this moment, besides Enrico’s proof of concept version of such an SDK, the only available technology stacks that would allow integration between Salesforce and Alexa were the Node.js and Java SDK’s. These could be hosted on Heroku and use Salesforce API’s to integrate.

Like Enrico, I wanted to build an on-platform (Force.com) Alexa Skill SDK. This common interest put us in contact. One of the results is this guest blog, not surprisingly, about AlexaForce. Not Enrico’s AlexaForce, but Harm’s AlexaForce. We apparently both came up with this very special name for the SDK (surprise, surprise) ;)

AlexaForce

The basic idea about this Force.com SDK for Alexa, is to remove the necessity to work with Salesforce data through the Salesforce API. The Java or Node.js approach would have Amazon send requests to Heroku and from therefore require API communication with Salesforce.

With the AlexaForce SDK, Amazon will send the Alexa requests straight to Salesforce, allowing a developer to have full access to the Salesforce data, using SOQL, SOSL and APEX. The resulting architecture is depicted on the image below.

For more information about AlexaForce and how to use it, please visit https://github.com/HKOLWD/AlexaForce. You will find code samples and a detailed instruction there. For this article, I will elaborate on a specific Alexa Skill design approach, which is still in beta at Amazon: Dialogs.

Dialogs

Generally spoken, the most important part of an Alexa Skill, is its Interaction Model. The Interaction Model is defined in the Amazon Developer Portal when creating a new skill. The model will determine how comprehensive your skill will be as well as its user-friendliness, among other things.

An Alexa Skill model generally consists of Intents and Slots. The Intent holds what the user is trying to achieve, the Slots contain details about the specifics of the user’s intention. For example, the Intent could be ordering a pizza, the Slots could be the name and size of the pizza, the delivery location and desired delivery time.

One could build a model that just defines Intents, Slots, Slot Types and some sample utterances. This type of model would put a lot of the handling of the conversation between Alexa and the user in your (APEX) code. Prompting for information, checking and validating user input etc. would all be up to your code.

Here’s where Dialogs come in handy. With a Dialog (which is still in beta at the time of this writing) you put some of the conversation handling inside the Interaction Model. In other words, besides defining Intents, Slots and Utterances, you also define Alexa’s responses to the user. For example, the phrase Alexa would use to ask for a specific piece of information or how to confirm information given by the user.

From an AlexaForce perspective, you could simply tell Alexa to handle the next response using this Dialog definition inside the Interaction Model. This is done by having AlexaForce send a Dialog.Delegate directive to Alexa.

Example

Imagine an Alexa Skill that takes support requests from the user and creates a Case in Salesforce based on the user’s request, a ServiceRequest (Intent) in this example.

Two important data points (Slots) need to be provided by the user:

1. The topic of the request. Represented by ServiceTopic in this example.
2. The description of the issue. Represented by IssueDescription in this example

A Dialog allows you to have Alexa collect the data points and have them confirmed autonomously. The APEX keeps delegating conversation handling to Alexa until all required Slots have been filled.

A Dialog has 3 states, STARTED, IN_PROGRESS and COMPLETED. When COMPLETED, you can be sure that Alexa has fully fulfilled the Intent as defined in your model, including all its required Slots. Below is a code sample that would implement this, returning true on Dialog completion.

if(req.dialogState == 'STARTED') {
    alexaforce.Model.AlexaDirective dir = new alexaforce.Model.AlexaDirective();
    dir.type = 'Dialog.Delegate';
    dirManager.setDirective(dir);
    return false;
} else if(req.dialogState != 'COMPLETED') {
    alexaforce.Model.AlexaDirective dir = new alexaforce.Model.AlexaDirective();
    dir.type = 'Dialog.Delegate';
    dirManager.setDirective(dir);
    return false;
            
} else {
    return true;
}

The APEX takes over again when Alexa sends the dialog state ‘COMPLETED’. Once this happens, both the ServiceTopic and IssueDescription will be available (and confirmed by Alexa) to your APEX to create the Case.

This example would be even more powerful if you set up account linking. This would allow users to first log in to Salesforce (e.g. a Community) and therefore providing the developer with information about the Salesforce User while creating the Case.

All of the code for this example, including the model and full APEX can be found here: https://github.com/HKOLWD/AlexaForce/tree/master/samples/Dialog.Delegate.

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] RingsTrue: Smarter phone numbers in Salesforce

This week's new post is dedicated to a new AppExchange app, meant to help us in one of the most difficult and annoying tasks on every CRM: phone number validation.

Thanks to our week's guest blogger Iain Clements.

Iain runs Cloud Ursa Ltd, a registered Salesforce partner based in the UK. In addition to helping customers configure Salesforce, we also make RingsTrue.

XConnect is a world renowned telecommunications routing specialist that provides the world’s leading global telephone number data and phone intelligence services. XConnect combines trusted information from hundreds of disparate global data sets and enables our customers to build the best communication services and applications using our unified data via simple, secure, scalable and real-time interfaces.

Managing data quality in Salesforce can be time-consuming.

Making sure that your customer records have correct telephone numbers is an endless task. However, authentic numbers lead to less failed call backs and lower contact centre costs. If that phone number belongs to a new potential customer, getting the right data also improves your business.

Can’t I just fix them with regular expressions?

Not easily! Unlike other global numbering schemes (eg IP addressing), Telephone Numbers have evolved organically, (and not necessarily logically). Using Regular Expressions (REGEX) means creating a set of rules, to take a string of information and ‘reformat’ that information into something else.

But what are these rules for Telephone Numbers?

• Is the number in national or international format?
• Does it include the national dialling code (eg 0)?
• Does it include a country code ? How many digits is that country code?
• Is the country code valid?
• Does the remaining number have the correct number of digits for that country code ?
• Is the National number prefix valid for that country?

So what’s the answer?

Well, we’re biased of course but we think our app RingsTrue is a huge time saver for this work.

RingsTrue powered by Xconnect brings a wide range of number checking functionality to your Salesforce environment and tells you if your telephone numbers are authentic or not. It’ll do the heavy lifting of formatting, validating, and actively testing the telephone number for every contact in your database.

Using RingsTrue, powered by XConnect, you will be able to:

• Identify which telephone numbers in your CRM are Authentic and whether an authentic telephone number is a mobile number, fixed line number, or some other telephone number type.
• Check which of the authentic telephone numbers is known to be In-Service with telecommunications provider.
• Discover additional information about the capabilities and services supported by the end-uses devices, as well additional data made available by the mobile service provider.

How do I install it?

1. Go to the Appexchange
2. Click on Get It Now
3. Choose to install in your test environment or your live environment
4. When installed, go to the RingsTrue homepage and either click 'Run' or choose a schedule of phone checking to suit your company
5. When RingsTrue has checked all of your records you will see clearly what the current status of that number is

Where can I try it out?

Try it for free for 5 days with no obligation, click here to start now!

[Javascript / Chrome / EasyPeasy] Blocking form autocomplete after Chrome Canary (version 65)

Recent Google Chrome update (65) brought something that developers are not liking too much: the autocomplete="off" attribute on forms and inputs is no more considered.

Read in depth this Stack Overflow thread.

The solution (not so clear) is to give a random autocomplete value to the autocomplete attribute of each input of the form:

$('form input').each( function(){
   $(this).attr('autocomplete','no-autocomplete-'+(Math.random()*Math.random()));
});

Also apparently Chrome uses the name attribute (at least for email and password values), in my use case the name attribute was not necessary in the form so this script worked like a charm.

[Salesforce / Apex Test] Code coverage and logical tests in Apex Test Classes

This article is actually a repost from a buddy I came across online.

I read his articles on LinkedIn by chance and I really appreciated the easy way he writes and how he delivers important Salesforce concepts.

I choose an article about Apex Test Coverage... but before going on the article...
...please take a moment to hail our beloved lord the deployment fish!

The guest blogger

Vladimir Egikyan is a SFDC developer since 2010. Most of his career he worked for technical services providing company in Israel. During that time he helped to implement business of various companies, among which are ZIM Integrated Shipping Services, Bank Leumi.
In the latest three years he works as in-house developer and sharpen his architect skills. Though he is officially certified only as Developer... yet ;)

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Writing good Apex Tests is a key to successful developing. There is a huge list of best practices and recommendations, that you can find in Salesforce documentation. Following them all, is what every developer should aim to do. Over years of developing on Salesforce, I learnt that code coverage is not what really matters…

How can that be?

Well, your coverage will raise by itself if you mind checking what your class or trigger has to do and what results you expect. Having said that, the most important thing that your test class has to do is to use System.assert methods to prove that code behaves properly. This will keep you on the safe side from any unintentional mistakes, changes in business requirements and eventually will save time and money on development process.

Okay, let’s take a look at the example:

TVRemoteControl class describes remote controls that can increase and decrease volume in scale 0-50 and have simple menu text.

Corresponding test class would contain call for each of class’ function:

TVRemoteControlTest covers the TVRemoteControl by 86% which is more than allowed minimum of 75% and these classes will deploy to production.

First and obvious defect of the test class is that it does not test if code will properly handle changing the volume beyond limits. The most important is we have to test that we get expected results in any possible use case. Our applications are almost never finished: business requirements constantly change. Besides that, we are all human and we always can make mistakes and test class is a tool that can help us to correct possible mistakes in time and that happens quite a lot.

Let’s see the better version of the test class.

This version of test class contains checking for going out of boundaries and also in each test method implements different use case and uses System.assert methods to make sure that class is performing the expected logic.

The given example is simple, but do not underestimate the importance of using assertion methods. Business logic in real life is way more complex then tv remote control, keep using these methods and you will be surprised how much time it saves for future technical support.

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] Skyvia: easy way to load your Salesforce data into Amazon Redshift

Here we are in the next Salesforce app guest post.

Skivia is a great solution for Data warehouse in the cloud, with tens of integrations and connectors to integrate, back up, access, and manage your cloud data
with an all-in-one cloud service. With Skivia service you have to think less about where to put all your data (from all your data sources on the cloud) to concentrate on analysis.

Skyvia is not an AppExchange app but it's an amazing service that fully deserves to be mentioned in one of the best services out there to work with Salesforce data.


The guest blogger

Jacob Martin is crazy about all stuff connected with coding, particularly all Hi-tech ones, such as Cloud computing, Big-Data, BI tools and CRMs in the broader sense.
He is a cloud engineer at Skyvia - the universal cloud data platform for no coding data integration, backup, management, and access.

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With the powerful data analysis features and low storage costs of cloud data warehouse services, loading data from cloud applications to data warehouses becomes a very common task. For example, you may want to get your cloud data to a database and then use some BI tool, such as Looker, Tableau, or chart.io, or just to store your historical cloud data in a database for archiving or compliance purposes.

In this article I will describe a way how to load data from Salesforce to Amazon Redshift with almost no efforts using Skyvia service. It is a cloud data platform for data integration, backup, management and access, which can perform this task with no coding and very little configuration.

Replication Configuration in Just a Few Steps

Skyvia is a completely cloud solution that requires no local software except a web browser, and all actions in it are performed via web browser, in a convenient web GUI.

To replicate your data via service, first, you need to register on it. Creating an account is free, and you can try Skyvia within its free pricing plan that allows you to load up to 5000 records per month between cloud applications and databases.

After you create an account, on the Integrations page, click Create Now under Replication. A replication package editor page is opened.

Setting up Connections

In our example, we will use Amazon Redshift as a target database for replication. Note that you may need to configure your AWS security settings to allow access to your Amazon Redshift cluster from Skyvia’s IP – 40.118.246.204. This is necessary for Skyvia to be able to load Salesforce data into your Redshift database.

First, we select connection types in the Source and Target headers, as we want to etl Salesforce data to Amazon Redshift, will choose them respectively. Note that Skyvia also supports other data warehouses and relational databases, including Google BigQuery, Asure SQL DWH, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. The full list of supported data sources you can find here.

After this, we need to create the corresponding connections. For Salesforce, the service supports both Username/password and OAuth connections. With the latter option, your Salesforce credentials are not stored on the Skyvia server. You simply enter a connection name, log in to Salesforce and allow Skyvia access to your data.

For Redshift, you need to specify the corresponding connection parameters. Note that for replication you not only need to specify main parameters for connecting to Redshift itself.

You also need to click Advanced and specify parameters for connecting to Amazon S3 storage.

To improve the replication performance, Skyvia creates CSV files with Salesforce data, uploads them to Amazon S3, and uses Redshift COPY command to quickly import data.

Selecting Objects

After you connected to your Salesforce and database, everything is simple. You will see the list of your Salesforce objects and you just need to select check boxes for the objects that you need to copy. A convenient object search allows you to quickly find and select the necessary objects.

You can perform complete or partial replication. For each object you can edit task and exclude some fields or set up filters to copy only a part of the data.

Running Replication

For one-time data loading this is enough. Click Save, and then you may run your replication.

By default, Skyvia automatically creates tables with the corresponding structure in the database, and in some minutes (depending on the volume of your Salesforce data), you will have an exact copies of your Salesforce objects in your database.

Keeping Data Up-to-date

Simple copying of data is not the only feature of Skyvia’s replication. However, for business analysis tasks it’s better to have access to as fresh data as possible. This task can easily be solved using flexible scheduling settings and allows automatically keep your copy of the data always up-to-date.

You can schedule your replication to run automatically and keep your Redshift database always synced with Salesforce. To configure a schedule open the created replication package for editing, and under Schedule (at bottom left of the package editor) click Set schedule.

Skyvia allows flexible schedule configuration. You can configure your replication to run monthly, weekly, daily, on specific weekdays, etc. In non-free pricing plans you may run replication and update your database with a fresh data from Salesforce every hour or every few minutes and get real-time insights on your data. Thus, after you configure your replication, you can easily keep your database always up-to-date.

Skyvia uses incremental updates. This means that every time it loads only the records that were changed in Salesforce since the previous package run, and applies the corresponding changes to the database. It can significantly improve performance and decrease costs, as the latter depends on the number of replicated records.

Universal Cloud Data Platform for Integration

Skyvia is a universal cloud data platform, and replication is only one of the supported integration scenarios. In addition to replication, it supports other operation kinds: import, export, and synchronization.

The replication is used when you need to simply copy data from a cloud app to a database or cloud data warehouse and automatically keep this copy in a current state with minimal configuration efforts. Synchronization synchronizes data in two sources bi-directionally. Export allows you to export data from cloud applications, like Salesforce, and databases to CSV files. Import serves for unidirectional data loading.

Import has some more complex configuration than replication, but it is much more flexible. It allows importing data from CSV files or from cloud applications and databases directly to other cloud applications and databases. Unlike replication, it doesn’t create target tables automatically. Instead you configure mapping between source and target tables and columns.

Powerful mapping settings allow you to load data between the data sources with the different data structure and formats while preserving relations between data. You can provide constant values, use powerful expressions, lookups, etc.

Import can be configured to load only newly updated or inserted records from Salesforce. Thus, we can perform a replication once to create the necessary tables and import all the data, and then configure import to load new and updated records from Salesforce.

As an all in one cloud data platform, Skyvia also offers a cloud to cloud backup solution, an online SQL query tool, and OData REST API server that can make your data available over the web.

Pricing

Skyvia’s integration pricing depends mostly on the number of loaded records. Additionally, higher pricing plans allow scheduling packages to run more often and having more scheduled packages.

Skyvia has a free pricing plan for data integration, allowing you to load 5000 records per month for free. So you can register an account on Skyvia for free and test it whether it suits to your needs and then decide whether to upgrade your pricing plan.

You can see details on Skyvia pricing on their pricing page.


Here is a handy video showing live how Skyvia works.

[Salesforce / Ecosystem] Salesforce Jobs: What’s Italian Salesforce really like?

I'm humbled and honored to present you the latest Mason Frank's salary survey results related to the italian market.

Few days before Dreamforce 17 I asked Maria Baranowska and Alan Ferrari (managers at Mason Frank) if they could send me the raw data about Italy's market of Mason Frank's annual salary survey and, surprise, they gave me a fantastic article with all the details and insights from the data.

Unfortunately at this time Italy market cannot compete with more developed ones, such as U.S.A, U.K, France or Germany, but the number of company that are adopting Salesforce and the number of Salesforce addicted nerds is rapidly incresing, and I really hope we'll see a lot of italian trailblazers coming out and invading the web!

Before leaving the proper space to this amazing article, I want to say again thank you to two great Mason Frank's trailblazers:

• Alan Ferrari [Manager at Mason Frank INternational] who wrote the final version of this post and gave it a true italian market value!
• Maria Baranowska [Outreach Executive at Mason Frank International] who I contacted first, granted me access to the draft italian data through a first draft of this post

Alan Ferrari

Focused on makes candidates’ lives better since 2009, I’ve started my career as an HR Assistant & Internal Recruiter Specialist. After a couple of experiences in our beautiful country as an HR&Talent Acquisition Manager I’ve decided to move out and try to expand my knowledge in UK moving deeper in the mysterious world (at that time) of Salesforce.com.
My adventure started with the opening of the Italian Market for the Frank Recruitment Group, and during my “years of service” I’ve contributed in the opening (and currently managing) of several foreign markets like Spain, Portugal, Central East Europe and Nordic Regions.
Passioned about IT and “Human Capital”, I’m trying to challenge myself everyday more and more in order to stand out from other recruiters bringing Mason Frank International to another level and keeping the standards as the world leader recruitment company in SFDC and Marketing Automation.

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Salesforce is the leader of the CRM market and one of the most successful technologies available today. Unlike many other tech companies who may parallel in innovation within their own field, Salesforce has cultivated a unique ecosystem (including but not limited to the Ohana) which makes it stand out from the rest.

That being said, what’s it like to be part of the Ohana in different parts of the world? In which countries can Salesforce professionals earn most and expect the greatest growth in the coming years?

Let me present myself first...

My name is Alan Ferrari and I am a Manager at Mason Frank International, the world’s leading Salesforce recruiter company.

Over the last few years, I’ve been learning about what it’s like to work in Salesforce.

Today, I’m going to share some of the most relevant insights I’ve picked up and help you understand one Salesforce market where I specialise most, Italy.

As you might know, every year, Mason Frank release their salary survey, where people working with Salesforce can find information and salaries for different positions, both technical and functional.

For the first time this year, due to popular demand, we’ve decided to include Italy in our research. Releasing the data exclusively here on Enrico’s blog, we will explore salaries in this growing market and speculate what the future may hold for professionals living here.

Needless to say, demand and salaries are not close to that of other countries where the technology has been active for a decade. This is clearly evidenced in the Salesforce salary survey report.

The good news is that in the last three to four years, the average salary in Italy has increased by more than the 60% in functional positions and more than the 80% in the technical professionals.

This is likely the result of the investment in the South of Europe over 2016/2017, managing to substantially increase the demand of professionals in this technology.

Here you can find the average Italian Salesforce salaries for each of the main positions:

Roles	Junior (0-3 years)	Mid (4-7 years)	Senior (8 years+)
Salesforce Manager	55,276	58,387	62,443
Project Manager	48,976	49,246	50,266
Technical Architect	55,298	57,147	60,527
Solution Architect	43,194	44,624	45,626
Technical Consultant	33,225	39,556	45,886
Functional Consultant	25,313	32,739	40,165
Developer	30,287	34,376	38,464
Business Analyst	28,773	32,349	35,924
Administrator	22,377	24,758	26,575
Marketing Automation Manager	40,179	41,878	43,967
Marketing Automation Specialist	30,112	32,453	35,249

Oh, the good old times!

I can’t forget the moment I completed my first placement in Salesforce.

I was working with a man who studied and worked in Salesforce for three to four years in the UK and was dreaming of coming back in Italy, so badly in fact, that was ready to accept a big cut in his salary in order to return.

He was soon hired as a Senior Developer for the incredible salary of 24,000€. If you look at the table above, the average salary is now about 10,000€ more. Incredibly, this didn’t happen 10 years ago, but the market has shifted so quickly this increase has happened in a fraction of time.

If you take a look at the rest of Europe, you will find different ranges of salaries in different countries, most of them being higher than in Italy.

That being said, what I’m often explaining to the job seekers I work with is:

1. The Italian ecosystem is fairly new.
   
   There are countries such as UK, Germany or France where Salesforce has been growing for more than seven or eight years and is established as one of the most important players in the CRM world.
   
   In Italy, only in the last 5 years (excluding our pioneer) has the technology been taken in the right consideration. This means the demand for people still isn’t the same as in other countries.
   
   
2. Cost of living. I’ve heard so many times people asking me to help them go to other countries because of the ‘unbelievable salaries’. What people don’t often realise is that the cost of living in a different city could be higher and what you take home at the end of the day might be less than what you have elsewhere. This is very relevant in Italy in particular.

So, what can we expect in the upcoming years?

As a recruiter, I can tell that the demand for SFDC professionals will reach sky-high levels during 2018. We are constantly looking for an increasing number of people and over the last three years, this demand has increased by a huge 160%.

New companies are adopting Salesforce and creating jobs every month.

Typically, the average Manager or Senior Manager in Italy is aged around 45 to 48 years old. In Salesforce, people are excelling to these positions around aged 32 to 35 years old. This is largely due to the fast growth and understaffing in this geographical market.

Skills and education

Another great asset of working with Salesforce, in Italy and beyond, is the lack of demand for a strict IT or technical background.

Furthermore, there is a general belief that formal, higher education isn’t a must. This year’s Salesforce salary survey revealed two-thirds of respondents don’t believe a degree is important to pursue a career in Salesforce (has been confirmed by most companies as well).

This means professionals can start climbing the corporate ladder sooner, often straight out of school. This is likely to give a greater of people the platform to enter tech careers and breakdown any previously existent stigmas.

Throughout my career as a Salesforce recruiter, I’ve learned that the average duration of a career in this field is around 12 to 18 months for junior positions, increasing to a longer term – otherwise known as tenure – with more senior positions. This could be due to the project-driven style of working within Salesforce.

This is a trend we’re seeing across the world. In developing Salesforce markets like Italy, this can be a great asset to workers as it gives flexibility and can allow people in a range of positions, from Admins to Developers, to experience a wide range of projects and products. It makes the market more dynamic, interesting, and challenging.

Inclusivity and gender diversity

Finally, Salesforce sets an example for their inclusivity and gender diversity. Since the boom of Salesforce, the number of women in IT has increased from 2.8% to 12%. Their own internal encouragement of coding for women, and accommodation of parental rights, sets an example to other businesses, especially those in their own ecosystem.

This attitude is particularly refreshing in developing markets, like Italy.

It could pave the way for drastic change in the representation of women in technology across the country.

What does this mean for you?

If you are working in Salesforce, or considering a career in it, there has never been a better time to do so, particularly in a country where the technology’s growth is high.

If you’re unsure of what you should be earning, consult resources like Mason Frank’s salary survey and compare your earnings against others.

If you need any advice on your Salesforce career prospects, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly and I’d be happy to do what I can to help.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

Good luck!

[Salesforce / Translation Workbench] Import/Export translations betwen ORGs with different metadata configuration

This guest post is written by one of the most powerful coworkers I've been working with in the last years.

His name is Tommaso Bolis and I call him the Robo-Bolis because I believe he's a smart and super productive top coder, and sometimes make me fear he's not human!

Jokes aside, it's months I'm asking him to write as a guest blogger for my blog and finally he decided to put some of his knowledge inside this humble blog.

Tommaso Bolis is a Solution Architect and Salesforce Senior Developer at WebResults, a Salesforce platinum italian partner. His main interests span from backend development to DB administration, to Javascript frontend development and, ofcourse, Salesforce.

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If you are the kind of guys belonging to the TL;DR party, here is an amazing GitHub repository with all the code to solve the challenge in the post's title.

Background: Multi region and content management

During one of my last projects I had to introduce on one of our customer’s site/community the multi region (EMEA, APAC, ...) content management and the multi language support.

This last requirement was particularly challenging (we are talking about 8 different languages including Japanese, Korean and Arabic...), but I don’t want to bother you with what have been done to accomplish the goal, I just want to tell you about one problem I have been facing trying to move translations among our different orgs.

If you have already played with translation workbench you know for sure how trying to export/import translations can be tricky.

The challenge: ORGs with different metadata configuration

The point is that if two orgs differ for some reason in terms of translatable metadata than the export/import process can fail and a manual adjustment of the exported data can be necessary in order to import the data inside the destination org without errors.

For example, if you have a custom label on the source org that has not been deployed on the destination org, when you try to export translations from the source org the resulting files will contain translation for this custom label and trying to import these files will result in errors.

Solution: Python app to rest easy

In order to solve this annoying problem I developed a Python script that takes files exported from the source org and process it removing all references to metadata that does not exist on the destination org.

In this way it is possible to import files without errors!

The idea is to use files exported from both orgs source and destination and simply remove everything is on source files but not on destination files.

This operation is enough to obtain a set of translation files that can be imported without errors.

Jump to this GitHub repository, fork it and follow the README.md file to run the magic!

Maybe around the web something similar already exist, but I can’t say no when I’ve to work on a good handcrafted script.

[AppExchange series] 10 best things you can do offline with Salesforce data (and Resco Mobile app)

Happy new year to everyone!

First post of 2018 celebrates the AppExchange: the call for guest AppExchange posts is getting a lot of answers and amazing ISVs want to share their app.

In this guest post I want to present you the Resco Mobile App, an amazing solution for Salesforce offline management, fully customizable with no coding skills, that leverages the power of Salesforce when the Salesforce app is not enough!

I'll leave the word to our guest blogger Barbora Piatrová, Content Strategist at Resco.net.

Barbora Piatrová takes her passion for digital marketing & mobile CRM everywhere she goes. Currently, she’s involved in creating & mastering content strategy at resco.net – one of the leading companies in the world for Mobile CRM. She is now actively also discovering and participating in new thriving communities for Salesforce enthusiasts.

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Offline matters. Especially nowadays.

Even in Europe, where Internet connectivity is generally perceived as very good, there are areas and countries with poor 3G and 4G support. There is a pocketful of places with poor or no connectivity possible. What about the garages, planes, rural/uninhabited areas, or elevators?

Offline is now available for Salesforce users in the field, indeed. Including sales professionals and field service technicians. The question is, how much offline can we actually get? Is access to the last 5 recently viewed objects what a field technician truly need? The same guy whose mission is to complete all the planned tasks, inspections or sales visits needs permanent offline access to all Salesforce data. It doesn’t end here though. A motivated sales and field service rep wishes to fulfill the mission irrespective of internet connectivity. Continuous work is necessary even in areas where such limited offline would not help.

Consider true offline. Follow the leaders.

Resco is among the leaders in providing world-class offline mobile solutions for various back-end solutions, including Salesforce.

You might have noticed that offline capability is currently being added to mobile apps by most CRM vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and others. In our opinion, offline is not a capability, which can be easily added to an online CRM app. Offline doesn’t only mean to add a local database support, providing the CRM data when the app is disconnected.

“Offline means that ALL the features and functionalities of the mobile CRM app are available also when the app is disconnected – with no limitations. Thus, the logic of every feature must be developed and implemented to the mobile app independently from the server. Otherwise, a feature will simply not work when the app is disconnected. But a mobile CRM app is usually the main business tool of every mobile sales or service professional. So, if it doesn’t provide 100% of functionality anywhere and anytime, it can cause immediate damages for a company’s business.”

Radomir Vozar, CEO at Resco
The primary focal point of Resco Mobile CRM is its offline capability. It has been implemented since the very beginning of its development. A complete, robust mobile solution, ready to serve its users whenever and wherever they happen to be. A completely different story in comparison to online CRM apps with offline capabilities.

In every release, we launch approximately 40 new features and improvements to our mobile app, including offline features. 18 years of development and hard work brought over 700 mobile features to life! And so, believe me, it was no easy feat, but we did come up with a list of 10 most used & useful features that prove that (in this case) both quantity and quality matter.

How to work with Resco Mobile App in an offline mode?

The same as if you’ve never left the room with wi-fi, switched off your mobile internet data or lost connection!

What exactly do we get in Resco with full offline support?

1. Business logic (not just data)
   
   Offline-first approach means, you can perform complex business processes and constraints allowing you to not only view – but create or edit business logic of the solution that works offline.
   
   
2. Maps
   
   System admins can define which maps will be stored in the local memory, so users can use the map view even without wi-fi or cellular connection to the Internet.
   
   
3. Document management (viewing and editing)
   
   Offline-capable solution knows no limitations. When working with documents (pdf, HTML, MS Office, MS Excel, HTML, SharePoint, Dropbox) offline, you can simply set up the filters that dictate which files should be downloaded to the offline database in your phone or tablet.
   
   
4. Knowledge base articles
   
   You get to not only access, but to play around with the articles about products, parts, and more. Filter articles of any format (pdf, HTML, video, audio, image…), copy them, add to favorites, associate with case or edit its details.
   
   
5. Reports
   
   Yes, that’s right! You can generate pdf reports on spot limitlessly. Generate and work with them even further. Want to store a report? Send it or print? It’s all up to you.
   
   
6. Offline HTML
   
   Who wouldn’t want to create their own business logic to the app for Salesforce? You can expand the app with tailor-made forms to add product presentations or to replace the standard user interface – all with offline HTML. Create stunning pres¬entations, get the scoop on your prospects by quickly looking at their online presence. Iframes allow you to show any HTML content in the application.
   
   
7. Lead conversion
   
   Did you know you can qualify/disqualify leads or convert them to a closed deal even offline? Yes, automated processes truly simplify the lives of sales guys on-the-go. Finally, you can nurture your leads properly.
   
   
8. Multimedia
   
   Show product presentation or attach pictures to your notes or any Salesforce record at any time! You can upload, edit, and delete multimedia including images, audio & video files (JPEG, PNG, AVI, etc.) and other formats.
   
   
9. Quotes
   
   Can’t create a quote while disconnected? That’s no longer a challenge. You can freely create a quote with respect to an actual corporate product catalog and its pricing policy.
   
   
10. Faster performance
    
    App performance is not to be underestimated in the enterprise space. With offline this robust, you don’t ever have to worry about waiting for network transactions to take place. Database reads and writes are stored locally, so the tasks are being completed instantly.
    
    And there is plenty more you can do! Endless offline capabilities include task management, notes and business information editing, offline managements of all objects (standard, custom), product/parts management, offline calendar, favorites, and so much more.
    
    

*Note that:
In offline mode, the database is stored locally on the de¬vice (for offline capability and faster performance of Resco Mobile CRM) is encrypted by default. The data encryption is based on an application key. The appli¬cation key is randomly generated when the database is created and protected by the user’s password. The key is stored in an encrypted form in device’s file system and decrypted when needed.

Curious to see real offline mobile solution for sales and field service scenarios in action? Simply, drop Resco a line at mobilecrm@resco.net or request a demo at the website!