[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.

---

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.

---

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 ;)

---

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.