This certification hasn’t been on my radar at all, as I’m not a developer, and this one is supposed to be the hardest one.
Two years ago Johann told me that he isn’t developer as well, but this one is doable. Ok, challenge accepted, after the CTA.
I did know that it is theoretical part and practical via superbadge, but I somehow didn’t properly check which superbadge. At the end I decided to do it quickly before they will upgrade it to LWC superbadge as I don’t really want to learn another thing. How surprised I’ve been that the superbadge is „only“ about VisualForce and APEX.
For the theoretical preparation I used the Focus on Force test, which I feel is even harder than the exam itself. It is (and the exam as well) surprisingly wide – going from VisualForce over Aura to LWC, obviously APEX is behind everything.
I learnt a few new things along the way, which is always the purpose why I do it. This time I remember the Continuation, which I haven’t been aware before at all, and that cacheable=true methods cannot be combined with DML operations. Besides that no really surprising things, which was surprising on its own.
The superbadge was kind of boring at the end – you know, writing all those tests and parts of the, pretty basic, code, not much challenge. The need to rewrite one of the classes into Queueable was the highlight.
Now I can claim to be PD2 certified as well and already checking which certification should be the next one.
One of the quickest idea in terms of implementation time into the product – at Dreamforce 2022 during TTTC Alon Waisman asked why we need to pay full licence for all integration users, when security and trust is one of the Salesforce values. The idea, which came after 20+ years on the market, has been immediately approved and during TrailblazerDX 2023 new licences have been announced. So merely 6 months after the wish we all (I mean Enterprise and above) got 5 free licences we can use for integration and additional one costs just 10$/month.
Why we need it?
First of all, there are two types of integrations and you can use these users only for one of them. Inbound (where external system calls into the Salesforce) and Outbound (where Salesforce calls external system).
While Outbound happens under the logged-in user, the Inbound was troubling so far as either the system admin or some other user gave their credentials into the other system and all updates have been tracked under them. Not best it terms of security and accountability.
With 5 of these licences we can give each external system their own user with their own set of permissions really tweaked to what the system needs to create/update in Salesforce. We will see which system made which changes and when and can track why it happened more precisily.
How to do it?
Just change the user licence to the new Salesforce Integration one.
There is profile already prepared, but it doesn’t provide access to the objects. So next step is to create permission sets and assign them to the user as David Smith summarizes in his article.
Step two – assign permission set licence. Without that you won’t be really able to assign any permission set with wider access you will create.
David also opened an interesting question about oAuth authentication or reseting a security token, where it seems you might need to switch into a full licence to do these things and then switch back. At the same time Salesforce Help says that oAuth 2.0 flow should be the way to go.
Let’s do it
Now just find the time to do the switch with my customers. While it looks easy at first (just switch and you are done) the fact that you can play with the access rights should lead to really think about what the other system should be allowed to do and limit it as much as possible. And that thinking process takes time.
It all started in January, when Ines happily shared on LinkedIn that she passed the Net Zero Cloud accreditation exam and I asked, whether it is at least a bit practical or full of theory about different scope definitions.
Two months later she presented at Prague User Group to almost 30 people (while 60 signed up). And … holly shit!
First of all – global warming is most likely here and I don’t want to make fun of it. I do offset my emissions when travelling to Dreamforce for example and I was really curious about this new cloud. But sometimes it is just tempting.
When this message came into my email followed by statement that we don’t want global warming because crocodiles will be in our rivers (again), well … that’s what I call a bad joke.
But here we are, with Ines in (virtual) front of us starting her presentation. This women is all over the place – Agile practitioner, author of several books, foodie, biomimicry practitioner, climate change couch, the list goes on. And it makes sense, why limit ourselves to one thing when we are interested in multiple.
Ok, back to Net Zero Cloud.
By 2030 we should be net zero, no offsetting allowed anymore and this product should help companies.
The product is expensive (she didn’t say it, but we found on the website), I still feel it needs at least a few people to maintain it (meaning mainly the data), when we speak about the implementation work it looks like it mainly consist of data import, user training and most likely some API integration (which all make sense and would be awesome if the product is really that complete and doesn’t need more).
The data model is crazy. I need to buy a bigger screen to take a look at it, period.
It has tons of nice dashboards, it can auto calculate some data based on different „conversion rates“, etc.
But still, even after this hour long presentation, I don’t really get it.
The cloud should help companies monitor how close to zero they are. Fine.
All companies should be net zero, no offsetting. So when we organize CzechDreamin, all our suppliers will be net zero including air lines, so we don’t need to worry as we don’t produce anything, right? And because we cannot offset we don’t have many chances to make it better.
I feel I got lost somewhere, obviously need another half a day of explanation for like 5 years old. But that’s good, we just need to be prepared that I’m probably not the only one.
You can enjoy the recording and maybe you will understand the whole picture better than me. What I learnt is, that I don’t need this accreditation and that was important goal as well. And yes, there is a Trailhead as well.
While sponsors are major thing, as based on their money we basically run the conference (while the ticket price might look steep in Czechia it more or less cover the refreshment part and I doubt we can charge several times more). Attendees are important as well because without them the sponsors won’t be interested in.
Speakers are interesting area. What works suprisingly well in the Salesforce community is their eagerness to present and the fact that we can „just“ publish the call for speakers and have enough submissions to choose from. It doesn’t mean that we don’t hunt for specific speakers on top of that or that we aren’t light or not covering some topics at all.
We are super grateful for the growing interest from speakers and I’m delighted to see the grows of local speakers, exactly one of the reasons we started with the event.
So this year we had 160+ submitted abstracts and space just for roughly 40 of them. Great variaty of topics, which we wanted to include all, but simply didn’t have the room for all of them. DevOps, flows, Slack, integration – you name it we had it and at the end you can select one or two of each unless we want to a conference specialized on certain topics, but they are there already – DevOpsDreamin, AutomationDreamin.
Two days conference would help us to have space for more sessions, but at the same time it will be way more demanding on the attendees. Who knows, maybe next year. Till then you need to take what we have, check our agenda and buy a ticket if you are interested in. No recording or streaming planned, you need to visit us in person.
While Salesforce claims that the spring is here (or will be here next week), I really hope, when looking outside of the window, that it will wait a bit longer. Right now I crave the snow so much.
Jokes aside, the Spring ’23 release is here and we should take a look what new and great features in brings. If nothing else, the logo is super cute this time.
The most crucial and visible change for all clients will be the auto enablement of MFA, which will be rolled out in phases during 2023 but at first you will still be able to disable it again. This is not relevant for SSO users and I already covered the MFA tooling previously.
Searchable fields are in beta, but it looks like we will be able to easily specify, per profile (what about permission sets?), which fields should be searchable for those users. Will see.
In reports we will have a new $USER variable which we can use for filtering. No more formula fields to calculate whether the running user is the one I want based on the record. (I don’t believe this example is the best, but based on Created By makes more sense)
Admins can also know better to which reports and dashboards are user subscribed (just open a new Subscriptions Report) and user can subscribe to even more reports! (15 now, was 7 before, which I didn’t even notice and always thought it was 5)
Final improvement of reports – when creating a new one you can filter by fields you need on it. Actually one more – you can add text and graphics to dashboard (beta feature) which sounds promising and brings new possibilites.
New template for Lightning Pages – Pinned Right Sidebar (3 regions) which might be super handy.
Also the „Apply and Automate Mass Access with User Access Policies (Beta)“ looks super cool and might simplify admins lives by automatically applying the right permissions sets, licences, groups, etc. based on set criterias.
Czechia has been updated – don’t look for Czech Republic anymore in the country picklist. Similar for a few more, Türkiye is probably the most interesting with all its non-English characters. (applies only for new orgs, in existing you need to change it manually)
Looks like Flow and External Services are the way to go in even more occasions, probably need to look into more details next time I need to do an integration.
Track field history for Activities (finally, even though I probably never needed it), but supports only 6 fields (compared to 20 on other objects). Better than nothing.
Plenty of developers related improvements I have absolutely no clue what they means. I really hope that means they are super low-level. The user modes on database operations look interesting, even though I know we should check before I probably never had a strong use case to do that.
DataWeave will be probably huge. I saw so many code with XML transformations, CSV parsing, etc. that this looks like blessing. „enforcing the same heap and CPU limits on the executing code“ is a bit disappointment, but for everything else we have the Salesforce Functions.
Dynamically Pass Bind Variables to a SOQL Query looks like a way how to have just one variable „merging“ all the other parameters for SOQL query into one. Might probably save some lines of code.
Do you use Flow on Experience Site with guest users? It most likely will stop working and you need to give access to the guest user for each flow separately.
Automotive Cloud is here, which isn’t that interesting, but some features there are. Like Contact to Contact Relationships, something similar exists in NPSP, Financial Cloud, … I wonder when they will make it part of the Core and cut from all those products. Would make so much sense.
Absolutely breaking – the activities buttons are being changed and new features added – list of emails or phone numbers directly in the icon. Users can still switch it back to the old design, but this is the new default from now on.
605 pages later this was about all which catched my attention. Plenty of clouds I didn’t know much about and don’t plan to find more, I finally realised I won’t be able to cover the full width of the platform. But their changes takes maybe even more than half of those pages, which kind of signals how many new features we really got. And a lot of them in beta. A bit sad I would say.
