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Being a Salesforce Consultant opens you up to a breadth of knowledge and experience within the platform, but there are always little ‘unknown features’ you could’ve used as a wow factor during a project that you simply didn’t know existed. For me, there were several of these useful tidbits that I picked up while studying for the Advanced Admin Exam.
Joined Reports
With Joined Reports, we can view different types of information and sets of data side-by-side in one singular report. The separate blocks of information can be thought of as separate reports that can be grouped across up to 5 blocks that share common field(s). Report filters can be set up on a block by block basis. Joined reports can be very useful for displaying Opportunities with different blocks for different stages or Cases with different blocks for New, Working, and Closed Cases or even the ratio of Cases to Assets for a specific Account. But don’t forget, you cannot use a Joined Report as a dashboard component in Lightning unless you first add a report chart!
Login Forensics
In my experience, most organizations that use Salesforce, utilize an external tool to provide alerts around suspicious login activities. While these tools have always proved to be successful, it wasn’t until studying for the Advanced Admin exam that I learned exactly how this activity is tracked and deemed suspicious inside Salesforce. Login forensics does not have a UI in Salesforce to manage or view login metrics data, but the following can be accessed through the API using LoginEvent and PlatformEventMetrics Objects:
- Average number of logins per user per a specified time
- Users that logged in during non-business hours
- Users that logged in from a suspicious IP range(s)
- User who logged in more than the average number of times
Unique Requirements that can be solved with Flow
- Process Builder cannot use an External ID Data Type field to update lookups such as User lookups or Record owners. Flow can store External ID fields or even text fields with record id’s as variables, which can be used at a later step in the Flow to update the necessary fields.
- Custom Code is not needed to update Salesforce records using data stored in an external system, i.e. Inventory Information. Advanced Admins can design an external object in Salesforce to access the Inventory Data, at which point a Flow can be used to look up the Inventory records in the external object and run automated processes against Salesforce records.
- Flow allows you to loop through records using Unique IDs other than Record IDs. For example, if an organization has purposely duplicated Lead records, Flow can loop through all records to locate those with matching email addresses and run field updates on the collection of records to keep their data in sync.
While there are many other bits of knowledge I picked up while studying for the Advanced Admin exam, these are a few that I’ve actually put to use after passing the exam. I hope you find them helpful and feel free to share any new tips and tricks you learned while studying in the comments below!
WRITTEN BY MEGAN WINTERLAND
