Email to Salesforce – Overview of a Top 3 Productivity Feature

May 4, 2012 by David Carnes • How To, Salesforce.com, Tools • 3 Comments

Use Email to Salesforce via Bcc Field - Credit Salesforce.com Help One of my favorite features in Salesforce.com is Email to Salesforce. It allows Users to send an email from their preferred mail client, BCC a unique email address, and have that email copied into Salesforce and associated with a Lead or Contact, Account and open Opportunity. It even supports file attachments being copied into Salesforce! For a busy sales team that leverages email in their selling efforts, this is a god send.

Activation requires a simple checkbox check by an Administrator. After that, each User is free to adjust their settings and get underway, BCC’ing their personal Email to Salesforce email address (an extremely long mess of characters) on emails they want preserved in the system. Our best practice is for each User to copy their own long unique address, and create a Contact in their mail client (i.e. Outlook, Gmail, Entourage, etc) with an easy to remember name such as “SFDC” or “Salesforce” and that long email address. Then Users can simply fire off emails, BCC’ing that address, and know that they’ll end up in Salesforce, associated to the correct Lead or Contact.

Before Users get going, they’ll want to take a moment to update their Email to Salesforce settings. Out of the box, Email to Salesforce does not associate emails to Opportunities or save file attachments- which takes two checks to correct. By default Email to Salesforce sends a confirmation email for every outgoing email- which I can’t stand, and immediately deactivate.

A recent feature enhancement allows us to prevent Email to Salesforce from firing on certain email domains, like our own.

FileExporter: A Nifty Tool for Mass Exporting Salesforce Files

April 10, 2012 by Prashant Kaw • How To, Salesforce.com, Tips, Tools • 2 Comments

Imagine it is Tuesday morning and you need to export all the Attachments from your Salesforce org. The only way to download files en masse from Salesforce.com is via the data export feature. However, you have your data export set to a weekly schedule (which is highly recommended!), but the most recent export was on Sunday. You won’t be able to export data for another 6 days.

Also, the data export settings were not set to include images, documents and attachments. So your most recent export is not useful. If you are on a tight schedule, or like me, you need instant gratification, you want a way get your files now!

Use FileExporter to Export SFDC Attachments, Content, or Documents

FileExporter is a free, easy to use tool that will allow you to download all your Salesforce org attachments, content and documents. It is also listed as a Force.com Labs App on the AppExchange. The tool was built by Ezra Kenigsberg a Salesforce data guru at Dell. You should follow him!

FileExporter Requirements

The requirements for using FileExporter are very straight forward. As of this post, the tool only works on Windows, XP or above. You need a valid Salesforce login. The interface asks if you are using a Production or Sandbox login, but we found that the tool works perfectly well with a Developer org as well. Lastly, you need to have the v24.0 of the Salesforce Apex Dataloader. You can download that from within your Salesforce instance under Data Management/Data Loader in your Administration Setup.

It also helps if you are comfortable using a Command Line Interface (CLI). While this is not a requirement, CLIs can be mildly intimidating to the faint of heart, but please do not let that deter you!

How it Works

Follow the setup instructions to install FileExporter on your computer. Double-Click the +FileExporter.bat file and follow the prompts as shown below to log into the system and tell FileExporter what type of files you would like to download. Once you’ve run through the wizard the files will be added to neat folders named Exported Attachments, Exported Documents and Exported Content respectively. Error and success files are also output to the folder if you run into issues.

The Bottom Line

One of the most helpful features is that each file that is exported has the original filename name and ID as the name of the file. This data can easily be extracted and transformed in Excel for the migration. FileExporter is extremely useful and very easy to use. If you need to download and migrate some files from salesforce please give FileExporter a whirl and if you like it, give some props to Ezra Kenigsberg for creating it and making it available to everyone!

Do you have a useful tip or great tool that helps you with Salesforce migrations or data management? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Butterfly Photo credit: farmgalphotos

Salesforce.com’s Workbench Tool Is Not Just For Developers

February 4, 2012 by David Carnes • Best Practices, Salesforce.com, Tools • 0 Comment

Workbench is a free tool from Salesforce.com that benefits Developers and System Administrators alike. Beyond its API and developer related utilities, it offers data tools that resemble and exceed those of the Data Loader. Best of all it is browser-based- you can access it via workbench.developerforce.com. It’s official description from the tools page on developer.force.com is:

This powerful, web-based suite of tools designed for administrators and developers to interact with Salesforce.com organizations via the Force.com APIs. Workbench includes robust support for the Force.com Partner, Bulk, Rest, Streaming, Metadata, and Apex APIs that allows users to describe, query, manipulate, and migrate both data and metadata in Salesforce.com organizations directly in their web browser with a simple and intuitive user interface.

We like suggesting Workbench for System Administrators because:

Query Results can display Record Counts, Lists, Matrices, and allow you to download Bulk XML and .csv files. You can play with and analyze your queries before committing to an export.
Those on a Mac can use it without additional software- just open a browser!
There are more data load options than Data Loader (Insert, Update, Upsert, Delete, Undelete, and Purge).
It gives us access to data and structural info from all Objects in the system (like the Data Loader).
We can include or exclude Deleted and Archived Records.
It works with Professional Edition when API is enabled.
It allows easy access to Production, Sandbox, and Pre-release orgs.

Some drawbacks to Workbench include:

An inability to save and reuse data load mappings, as we can do with the Data Loader.
No ability to do command line or scheduled actions, as with the Data Loader (not that we’ve ever seen anyone do either).
It is not a supported Salesforce.com tool.

New DemandTools Enhancements to Help with Your Salesforce Data Health

August 26, 2011 by Boom Bertetti • Lead Quality, Salesforce.com, Tips, Tools • 0 Comment

Have you ever searched for a contact in Salesforce only to return a dozen or more Contacts and Leads with the same name and the same Account in your search results? What did you do after you saw those contacts?

Data duplication can cause a lot of problems when trying to run your Salesforce or CRM operations efficiently. Common issues are inaccurate numbers on reports, exceeding data storage limits and most importantly it can turn users away from using the system because they don’t trust the data.

System administrators spend a lot of time cleaning up data manually in Excel and import them back into the system with Salesforce DataLoader. While it may sound simplistic it involves more than deletion of duplicate data. Often admins have to reassign related objects from the duplicate data to the master record. Yes, it is very challenging and isn’t fun without a tool that can do it all.

DemandTools from CRMFusion is probably the best tool available to handle all of these issues. DemandTools is available on the Salesforce AppExchange and allows admins to cleanse duplicates in any type of object in Salesforce. Besides data cleansing it is also used for data maintenance, discovery and verification. It also includes a nifty data update tool that can mass transfer records to the new owners.

We use DemandTools at OpFocus and so do a lot of our customers so we thought we would share some of our favorite new features in their recent update:

MassImpact Enhancements

MassImpact allows admins to select a set of records in Salesforce and apply changes uniformly across the entire set without the need for importing or exporting data. This functionality allows admins to develop and maintain data standards by developing corrective actions (scenarios) to common data mistakes. Recent enhancements we liked:

Conditional Object Counts: With the “Limit by where condition” we can count records using the condition with any field in the sub-object or use “Field Sum” to sum number or currency field in the selected sub-object and use that number to update a custom field in the selected object.
NEW TrimSpaces Formulas: I remember trying to do VLOOKUP to match Account Names in Excel and they looked exactly the same but the formula returned #N/A. Later I found out that the source data had end spaces (a lot of spaces), which I couldn’t see. I’m glad that DemandTools has added this feature to the new version, so I can trim all invisible leading and trailing spaces before I do a VLOOKUP.
ProperCaseName Formula Enhancements
ONLY attempts to proper case when the input data is all in upper or lower case – No more funny looking account names. All the names with improper format will be taken care of.
Improved logic to better identify abbreviations when there is no punctuation between the letters (based on a word having no vowels)
NEW ProperCaseOverrides.txt file available in DemandToolsData\ReplaceList directory for user customization

MassEffect Changes

MassEffect is a fully international character compatible data loading tool for Salesforce that allows one to import, export, update and delete Salesforce and Force.com platform data. There’s one cool, new enhancement to MassEffect

Export UNLIMITED records to .csv: An unlimited number of records can now be exported to a csv file without any memory errors (Yes!).

Single Table Deduplicator Enhancements

As the name suggests Single Table Deduplicator is the industry standard for batch deduplication for Salesforce. It can find and merge data in any Salesforce objects including custom objects. The tool provides great flexibility in terms of how dupes are identified with multiple methods available for merging records. Single Table Dedupe just made some nifty Master Rule enhancements:

The Master Rule “Most Opportunities and Contacts” now runs 100+ times faster than before allowing one to process large sets of duplicate groups faster than before.
The tool can also display the calculated Opportunity, Contact and Active Contract counts AFTER a master rule is applied. As an example it is helpful to see which Account really has the most Opportunities in Salesforce.

Visit the DemandTools site if you are interested in learning more about the latest release. CRM Fusion also has some other great tools to help you manage data such as PeopleImport and DupeBlocker and worthy of your attention.

What tools are you using to manage duplicates or maintain database health at your company? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Meet the OpFocus Team at Dreamforce 2011 This Summer

That’s right! The OpFocus team will be at Dreamforce to soak in all the information that Salesforce.com has to offer and meet with old and new friends alike. If you are a customer, a friend or a fan of OpFocus, please let us know if you will be attending Dreamforce. We would love to see you there!

Tools