Why to keep finger on the pulse of the Ohana community?

Everyone talks about Ohana, which for Salesforce people mean the community, family around the product. Most articles I read about it focus on conferences or success community, so feel free to read them and get a feeling, my point is a bit different:

As I do interviews with people a lot of them mention Trailhead as their primary source of knowledge. A few mention Success Trailblazer Community or Release Summary, even less Twitter and blogs. To me, that is the important part.

I spend quiet a lot of time monitoring my Twitter feed, I don’t follow as many blogs as I did a years ago, but still quite a lot of them. And I take this time as investment, because when I need to solve something I’m pretty sure I already read about it or have an idea where to ask.

You know all those Chrome extensions? Ben McCarthy published a great list of them, I still learn about new (thanks Hana and Rudolf for tips). One area solved.

With Lightning you have to switch from attachments to files. All people I heard struggle, but there is no point – Doug wrote an app which does this conversion for you. Would you visit his website, stay for longer. Ever struggled to schedule process builder? Solved. Need to post to Chatter as any user? I needed it a few weeks ago, solved.

Rollup fields are awesome, but they work only for Master-Details links. For Lookup you need to use some other solution. Either write custom trigger, use Rollup Helper (which is free up to 3 rollups) or use Andy’s great Declarative Rollup Tool. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it, but once you are behind this you are fine.

Rakesh Gupta is the man behind Automation Champion – if you look how to solve ANY usecase for process builder or flow, you will find it on his blog. At first I didn’t understand why he covers similar scenarios, but then found out that not everyone is advanced enough to realize it is the same usecase.

Alex is behind the unofficial flow components site and I ‚ve been pretty surprise that Salesforcers recommend this site as a way to solve your needs in Flow. Not officially supported, but delivered by someone from the product team.


The whole point of this post is, that when you search for solution you might be able to find it. If you know, you can search for it. But if you follow the Ohana, you will know what is possible, even though release notes didn’t say a thing about it. And to me, that’s worth the time invested.

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