Tag Archives: community

Oct 20 2014

For the KIDS

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Alright, Community. We’re winding down from Dreamforce, an exhausting event, to say the least. There’s a lot to do and a lot to absorb at Dreamforce, but one of the themes that appears again and again at every Dreamforce is one of philanthropy. Marc Benioff is well-known for his 1-1-1 business model, in which businesses commit to devoting 1% of their time, money, and product to charities in need.

In the spirit of that mindset, I’d like to ask you, my fellow Salesforce community members, a favor. This year, I am working with the Extra-Life charity, a group that works to provide funds for the Children’s Miracle Network hospitals, specifically for children whose families cannot afford the medical treatment they need to live without pain or even survive. Our major event is this Saturday, and I am helping to raise money for this incredibly worthy cause.

There are not many things that are as life-changing as meeting the 10-year-old boy whose life you helped to save by raising money to pay for his surgery, hearing his words of gratitude, and receiving the deeply-heartfelt hug of a young life given hope.

Please, if you can help any amount at all, please consider donating to this cause before Saturday. You can do so by clicking here or on the banner image above, which will take you to a secure donation page. The entire donation will go to children in need. You can visit Extra-Life.org for any validation you may need, and of course, it’s tax-deductible.

Jul 18 2014

The First Not-Really-Annual-We-Just-Do-This-When-We-Feel-Like-It Community Flow Hackathon!

2012.05.04-HackathonOn the 25th of June in the year of our lord 2014, it was hereby decreed that there would be a great ‘Thon of Hacking, dedicated to the communication of ideas and knowledge of The Great Flow. Over the following 7 days, many heroes from across the land ventured forth to slay the Dragon of Communal Ignorance, valiantly submitting their contributions and felling the great beast. When the dust cleared on the 2nd of July, there were only victors.

Hang on, I think my nerd is showing. Can you tell I run Dungeons & Dragons games in my spare time?

If you have any interest in Flow, I highly advise heading to the Success Community page for the #Sp14FlowHackathon topic, where you can see the collective hackathon in its entirety. It was started in the group “Official: Salesforce Workflow Automation“, and there truly were some amazing ideas. I’ll be dedicating an entire blog post to my submission next week, but at the moment I want to highlight some of the other submissions here.

(The following “awards” are mine and mine alone, and I do not represent Salesforce or any other company or individual.)

Best Use of New Features Award – Reassign Records when the Owner becomes Inactive

Jen Nelson brings the awesome with a Flow that uses Flow Triggers, Fast Lookups and Loops seamlessly. What’s more, it’s incredibly useful to ANY admin and operates quietly, predictably, and seamlessly. It’s the sort of automation that throws off new admins in the org; it’s so clean that it fools them into thinking it’s part of core Salesforce functionality, not realizing something else enabled it. Hey Jen, be sure you train any new admin you work with that this is flow! Otherwise he’s going to get that question wrong on his 201 Certification test!

Most Work Saved Award – Assign and Maintain Due Dates for all Tasks in a Campaign

Jen Dunn not only wins the award for Most Work Saved, but also for Most Patient Users! Whoever had the job of manually assigning and updating up to 35 tasks had a crap job, and Jen made it a whole lot easier! I just hope you didn’t put someone out of a job! This is a prime example of the power of Flow: taking a massive, repetitive task and reducing it to a few clicks. Bravo.

Wildest Idea Award – Clone Chatter Group with Members

Rakesh “The Flow Machine” Gupta makes us all ask ourselves the deep philosophical question: “Will I ever have to clone a Chatter Group? And if so, what am I going to do about all those Members?” That’s heavy, man. So hardcore. If nothing else, I love Flows like this because they make admins stop and say “Wait, Flow can do THAT? If it can do that, I wonder what else it’s capable of.” Nothing better illustrates the breadth of awesome that Flow can accomplish.

These are just some of the Flows that were shown. Go and take a look at the rest!