Salesforce Ninja: An Elite Blog about Salesforce.com

The world runs of Data. Having correct data can determine if your business succeeds or fails. Since the emergence of Cloud Computing, Data escaped its normal prison of sitting on servers and became relevant. But the most important aspect about cloud was data was not interchangeable. I.e., It escaped the prison but was trapped in a zoo. In a large organisation if there was a need for using more than one system to manage data, it became a development nightmare. Not to mention maintaining multiple connections and data consistency between two systems, middle-wares (if any) and still keeping it under the governor limits. Salesforce Lighting connect lets you overcome this limitation by using the (soon to be) global standard OData protocol. With external objects you can connect to an external data source like SAP or any other database that uses OData protocol or a simple URL. What this means is you can have orders in SAP and customer Data in Salesforce. Both will be connected togethe...

Out Guest Ninja for the day is MVP Shivanath Devinarayan  from Force.com Unlimited. Shiva is talking about his favorite Winter 15 features. Handing it over to Shiva My Favorite Salesforce.com Winter '15 features  Duplicate alerts and blocking - One of more requested features, but yet not in full power yet due to the Beta release. It embraces the data.com side of Salesforce; you will be allowed to setup rules on how to identify duplicates and will have full control on the process. Currently available for Accounts, Leads and Contacts.  Read more:  ( http://goo.gl/uPTV8b ) Queuable interface – Now you can have total control over how your Async jobs are processed, with the new Queuable interface that your Apex classes can implement, you can enqueue jobs that you need to process, like insert a bunch of accounts.  Read more: (http://goo.gl/E8APyN) Customize Community with Community Designer – Gone are the days where you needed to be an HTML ninja or...

Its freezing cold out here. When I say its cold, I mean its cold, the cruel hellish humid city of Mumbai is also wrapped in the basket of coldness and finally after a decade, Mumbaikars (people from mumbai) have a topic of conversation with Delhites (people from Delhi) over cold. But while the entire world is still coping with the cold of winter, the clouds have already moved on to spring. Salesforce has come out with the Spring 12 release and it contains a bug, no not software bug but a lady bug on the leaf. Obviously on the glorious traditions, new updates to not mean patches to cover up your mistakes, it means glorious new features and new things. As with the tradition with this blog, this is a feature to discuss top ten features that I find interesting in the update. Chatter Now Instant messenger inside chatter is now Generally Available. This is a good move towards turning into the one tool for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. This can be the next Office Communic...

There was a time when I used to flash my light saber in a cool Jedi style writing code, customizing things. I used to attend every release and even predict things that would come. I used to proudly tell people, 'Aah that can be done, oh no this is a workaround,' and other flashy things. But, all good things come to an end. With so many features coming in with Winter 12, I have no idea which way I should begin with. Now, I am looking for Sensei. I have to learn Chatter, Ruby, Heroku, Mobile Apps, Rest API. Sigh, this is a general cribbing as I open the long length of document to plumb through the Winter 12 release note. Chatter will be over in a jiffy, Ruby book is purchased, I love Android and REST all is fine. So let me fold my sleeves and get into the release notes and as the tradition older than S-controls, will come up with the geeky my favorite winter 12 feature blog post next. Hopefully will do it before the next release. Vallah. Thanks for listening.

Man is a social animal. That is one thing man is sure about history, rest all is still a mystery. Once upon a time, man invented fire, to socialize with his friends at night. Then many million years later, people build houses countries and stuff and then he thought, what the, my friends are gone, whom will I socialize at night? And thus he invented the internet... true story. Well, not exactly true, but who cares, we are social now. When I wake up early morning, I no longer check if there were any mis-cals last night, I also check if there were twitter mentions, facebook notifications for me. And my android facilitates all this with a single swipe of my thumb. The bottom line, we are social. And if you still don't have a internet line on your computer, you probably are still living in caves. So Salesforce has grown, grown large like a big puppy and oh, it has also learned some new tricks. The latest release of Salesforce spring 11 boast of more social, more mobile, more success...

Force.com Labs never cease to surprise and please you during every new release. After creating a lot of buzz with their new chatter this time, they are now back with the Winter 11. Things that ROCK in winter 11' 1. System Log console If you have not seen the awesomeness yet, check out the brand new System Console. I know this feature is quite old in other languages and their sophisticated IDE's but for a force.com developer, this will be a amazing feature to debug languages. Have only seen the screen shot, so will need to confirm what exactly it shows. Check out this blog post for a sneak peek, which includes this amazing screenshot: 2. Visualforce Chatter Components: The power of Force.com comes with simple tools for complex business processes. The Chatter components for Visualforce will help embed chatter feed into the Visualforce page. With simple tags like. <Chatter: FeedWithFollowers entityId={!RecordId}/> 3. Language Translation for Force.com This f...

Salesforce.com has done it again, coming in Summer 10, we take a exponential leap onto cloud and a brand new chatter application, openSocial web starts making sense. With Chatter you can follow your objects, records or even users. Its just like twitter on steroids, with twitter anybody can make a tweet, in chatter its everybody in your own organization. You can follow records, objects and applications using a simple click of a button on the chatter section of the page. After that all the changes you follow can be seen on a single page, your dashboard. E.g., You can now follow individual records and see if they have changed: I wish to track changes on the opportunity and want to follow it through the stages, all I do is click on 'follow' of the opportunity record. Also, I follow a certain case which was previously owned by me but now is transfered to someone else. I can keep a track of the items I want to follow, next time I login, and the case is closed or the ...