(With apologies to Stanley Kubrick)  We’re about to begin a Salesforce rollout to a new team of users and I thought I’d share the steps I’m taking to prepare everyone for the big change that’s about to happen:

• Communicate early and often! We let people know months ago that this was coming, and kept reminding them every few weeks.  Not in a nagging way, but just to keep it from going completely off their radar.
• Enlist the “difficult” users first! You know who these people are, they’re the ones who won’t want to touch Salesforce with a 10 foot pole.   You’ll get their buy in by making them feel invested in the outcome, and letting them know that you’re really listening to their concerns (by  making changes to your training documents or Salesforce to make their lives easier).   Once the “difficult ones” see the light, they’ll be your biggest evangelists.
• Beta test with a user or set of users first.  That way they can give you feedback on what’s working and what’s not, and you can make changes accordingly.  Don’t forget to REWARD your beta testers too – candy or booze always works well for me.  And thank them publicly too.
• Use help text! Since Help Text on Standard Fields is now coming in Winter 10 (at last!), don’t be stingy with using these everywhere you possibly can.  It’s always easier to mouseover a little help bubble than to open a manual/wiki/screencast/sticky note/etc.
• Create documentation! This could be a Word or Google doc, a Wiki, a Screencast (I love Jing for these), whatever – just make sure this is something easily accessible to everyone who needs it.  I like to create a custom web tab (Called “TRAINING MANUALS” or something descriptive) that embeds links to everything on one page.  And make sure that someone knows how to update it when you’ve hit the lottery and moved to Kauai!
• Have a plan! Make sure that you’ve got all these steps written out, and a timeline to implement!  Salesforce rollouts are not an overnight process, and you should plan on things taking a while.

Stay tuned for a future post about monitoring user adoption.  For more on the topic of managing technology change in your org, I refer you to one of the best sessions at this year’s  Nonprofit Technology Conference, “Technology Ch-Ch-Change: Managing Technological Change in Your Organization” and to Dahna Goldstein’s chapter in the NTEN book.  Enjoy!

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!

Some time ago, I had a client who needed an easy way for inexperienced users to filter a report, on a regular basis, based on several different criteria.  In Salesforce, anyone can filter a report like this, but it takes a couple dozen clicks and a bunch of typing.  I wrote a simple s-control that allowed users to filter the report in a really simple interface.

When the user selects values and then clicks Search, the Javascript code builds a long URL that tells Salesforce to open the report and apply all the selected filters – something like this:

https://na3.salesforce.com/00O50000001QCuS?pc2=00N50000001JsTx&pn2=eq&
pv2=American%20Sign%20Language&pc4=00N50000001JsUX&pn4=in&pv4=Immunizations&
pc5=00N50000001JvOE&pn5=in&pv5=North%20End& pc6=00N50000001JvNO&pn6=eq&pv6=1

I showed my s-control to Drew Piston at a Salesforce event last year, and it turns out he was hoping to do something similar for his group at the Bay Area Chapter of Red Cross.  This week, he posted a Jing screencast that shows his version of the s-control in action.

Thanks Drew! 

I thought this presentation from Susan Harrison at the NYC Department of Education was really interesting about how they use Salesforce in the Bronx Lab School, and several other NYC Public schools.  The principal, Marc Sternberg, was brought on stage during Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce.

http://www.slideshare.net/mbaizman/doe-10407

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