This is my first post after a long hiatus involving a move to a new city (Boston), and to a new job as Technology Manager at Root Cause, a nonprofit in Cambridge, MA.  One of my first and biggest challenges here has been getting our Salesforce database under control.  After 4 years, every user was a System Administrator, and nobody knew what most of the custom fields and objects were being used for!  It was a disaster.

big mess o' computers

Here are some of the things I did to get our database back under control:

• I talked to the currently active users, and got their buy in to make changes as long as they weren’t catastrophic to the way they were currently doing things.
• I formed a “data cleanup” team to start wrangling some of the thorny data issues.  One of the best things we did (thanks, interns!) was use DemandTools to create an Access database backup of our entire Salesforce database, then look at every single field in every single object and report on how much data was there!  We got some very surprising answers for fields we thought everyone was supposed to be using (they weren’t, or the data was inconsistent).
• I formed a “SF Training Team” to create a Salesforce manual and make some screencasts using Jing.
• I started getting definitions for all custom fields, and adding it to the Help Text balloons, so people were no longer mystified as to what went in a certain field.  (By the way, PLEASE give us help text for standard fields, Salesforce!)

Hope this helps any of you out there who are inheriting a database “of a certain age.”  Good luck, and any comments are welcome!