With COVID-19 (Coronavirus) affecting the entire world and Israel, in our local Salesforce community we thought about how we can help those affected by the situation. (You can help too, see the last section).

Again, Assaf Yoshpe, an active member in our local Salesforce community, has stepped in with some creative and novel strategies to help fill this void picking up the challenge, organizing, and orchestrated it.
Everyone has volunteered, and we have used the same model Assaf has crafted (that can be cloned! see the action item below) that offers new Salesforce Admins a community-led training course, and we set off offering Salesforce Admin training ABSOLUTELY FREE.

Everything was done in Hebrew to make it available to the local community using remote learning tools to learn a SaaS product (Salesforce) and it can be learned from everywhere.

The result

Anyone in Israel can jumpstart their new career as a Salesforce Admin with a FREE, online course, taught by experienced Salesforce professionals from the local Israeli community:

Throughout the course, we used and leveraged Trailhead, Salesforce’s free LMS that is not only an LMS but also a gamification platform, as our “digital textbook” for students to read, learn and review the material that will be taught live in class.

Feedback

Already in our first lessons, we saw a huge response from our community and had more than 90 students attending:

Thank you to:

Teachers, by order of teaching: Shay Mualem, Laetitia Elbaz, Liraz Zohar, Irit Koyfman, Ira Dizengof, Karin Kraus, Ofri Heffetz, Daniela Levin, Ori Hirsch, Yaniv Ninyo, Gil Raveh, Eyal Zarankin, and Lenny Dvash.
But it is not only them, but we also had even more volunteers that wanted to help, there is no question that the Israeli Salesforce community is very helpful and very resourceful, and willing to help all!

Your Action Item!

I hope this kind of initiative will take form and will be spread across the world since we know there is a need for Salesforce Administrators worldwide, and I hope that in the near future we will be able to create this kind of Community-led courses throughout the world. If you want to start this initiative in your local area, please leave a comment below, and we’ll be in touch!

A bit of background:

While you are building your product on the Salesforce platform and you are getting your Managed Package ready to deploy to your customers, you ought to have some methods to show your customers or maybe track what you are doing, and to deliver this solution to your customers.

This is why many ISV partners have reports as part of their solution, however, it’s important to know and realize that the page layouts, reports, and dashboards included in your Managed Package are effectively unmanaged (link to the documentation). This means they can be edited, or deleted by the customer. Furthermore, they cannot be upgraded by you. So any time you include and then depend on reports, or dashboards, in your package, it will most likely end in tears (literally).

For example, one of Salesforce’s ISV posted:

“Our app is utilizing dashboards and Lightning components that are dependent upon packaged reports. However there is a known issue out there and users can delete packaged reports. So for every release we push, we have a handful of clients who have deleted some random report. And no, they don’t delete the same one so it is a few clients and a few reports. It causes a deploy errors.”

Solutions

There are a few things you can do. One is not to have reports and dashboards as part of your offering. However, since you are reading this, I guess you do want to have Reports as part of your offering. On a personal note, I think that having reports helps you show the value you bring to your customers. (WHY)

So let’s check the options we have

The first is to build out your own reports and dashboards using the platform, or using other coding techniques:
Create a Visualforce Page or a Lightning Page and create a tab for it. This will provide you a lot of functionality since you can control everything: logic, and display etc. The downside of it is that it will require development (time and resources). Having said that, the ability to ensure your clients see the data you want them to see is a huge benefit.

A second approach would be to create a depended Package just for reports, this will create separation from your Product Release Cycle from the reports of the product. The greatest benefit is the convenience of releasing reports: you could ask the customer just to install a package to get the reports. If you choose this approach, my recommendation is to consider having an unmanaged package that contains the Reports, Dashboards and Page Layouts.

A third option would be to create a report and to pass report filter parameters using a URL, this solution is great if you have your report and you only need to pass dynamic values to your report in order to filter it to fit the right query.

Finally, what you could also do is to edit and control the reports you provide to your customers. This requires the use of a metadata call. For this, you have the Metadata API or the Analytics API. Take into consideration that the Metadata API of Reports and Dashboards isn’t one of the easiest Salesforce API (to say the least, as it is not well documented at present). Also, it brings in a few other questions such as: if the user creates a report using Metadata API, what happens if the user clicks again on “Generate Report”, does it relaces it, or does it create a new one? What happens if a user changes the report using the native Report Builder?
Note, that once you have in your application a function that changes the metadata of the organization you must notify your users about it.

To summarise, I would recommend building your own reports using the Salesforce Platform if possible, and if not, then alternatively to have it as a standalone unmanaged package. Here is a flow chart of the decisions points I am going through when deciding on a reporting solution:

Please share your thoughts, I would love to hear other opinions!

Cheers,

Roy

By the way, here is how a Salesforce dashboard looks 😉:

Safe Harber \ Forward-Looking note:

In my talks with the 2nd Gen Packaging Product team at Dreamforce 2019, it seems that in the future one listing could contain several packages. When this will be the case it might be better to create one listing with two packages: one for Product release and one for Reports release. But that needs to be reviewed once we can understand the capabilities that will be delivered as part of this change.

Related Known Issues

Note that when using Reports in your Managed Package you also have a couple of known issues which you need to watch out for:

• Managed Lightning Dashboard components fail to create when deployed via push upgrade
• Managed Package upgrade fails due to subscriber deleting a report

Within the last few months, we’ve noticed some trends within the local Salesforce community in Israel. While the demand for Salesforce Administrators has continued to rise significantly, many organizations have been reluctant to hire Junior Administrators who didn’t have any training. In fact, it seemed like nearly every job posting required at least 2 years experience.

Over the years we had our Trailblazers Community Group which helps Salesforce Administrators and Developers to teach best practices and share lessons learned, to identify and solve issues that we all encounter. However, we realized that the majority of the people attending our meetups, events and office hours were those Salesforce Admins who already had experience. We realized that we needed to take a somewhat different approach to actively include newbies into our local Salesforce community in Israel. Having that said, we know the problem is a worldwide problem and that there is a Human Capital gap:

So, Assaf Yoshpe, an active member in our local Salesforce community, has stepped in with some creative and novel strategies to help fill this void picking up the challenge, organizing, and orchestrated it.
Assaf has crafted a model (that can be cloned! see the action item below) that offers new Salesforce Admins a community-led training course, offered ABSOLUTELY FREE. Assaf has secured venues (donating their spaces) to host the course, as well as volunteer instructors who will be delivering the course through a personalized, hands-on approach.

We having taken no sponsorship since we want it to be without any outside influence of any kind. This classroom-style Salesforce Admin course is offered without any sponsorships from any company (including Salesforce app vendors), resulting in an exciting initiative that is 100% volunteer-based and community-driven.

The result: A free Community-based course for new Administrators!

Anyone in Israel can now jumpstart their new career as a Salesforce Admin with a FREE, in-person course, taught by experienced Salesforce professionals from the local Israeli community.

A few statistics of the course:

• Gender diversity of attendees: 50% Male, and 50% Female.
• 18 lectures.
• 18 Lecturers.
• 8 venues.

List of Lessons

Throughout our course, we will be leveraging Trailhead, Salesforce’s free LMS that is not only an LMS but also a gamification platform, as our “digital textbook” for students to read, learn and review the material that will be taught live in class. This will help focus our lessons will focus on real-life scenarios and ensure that our participants are prepared for challenges that are common within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Below is a list of lessons, all of which will be delivered in Hebrew, to help our local community members understand these concepts in their local language. Each lecture will be recorded so that future generations can access the recordings, too:

Thank you!

Teachers, by order of teaching: Shay Mualem, Laetitia Elbaz, Yaniv Oren, Irit Koyfman, Ira Dizengof, Karin Kraus, Ofri Heffetz, Daniela Levin, Idan Bliech, Gil Hod, Ori Hirsch, Yaniv Ninyo, Gil Raveh, Gal Siloni, Eyal Zarankin, and Lenny Dvash.

Venue providers:

Salesforce, IronSource, Trusteer (IBM Security), PwC, SimilarWeb, Gett, AllCloud, and Strauss Water.

It is great to have such a great ecosystem, that people volunteer to help others succeed, and that we can generate something real: the next generations of our ecosystem!

Your Action Item!

I hope this kind of initiative will take form and will be spread across the world since we know there is a need for Salesforce Administrators worldwide, and I hope that in the near future we will be able to create this kind of Community-led courses throughout the world. If you want to start this initiative in your local area, please leave a comment below, and we’ll be in touch!