I am not going to lie, I was super skeptical when Trailhead was initially launched and I still have some concerns. But after spending some time working on completing the requisite badges to get my platform developer II certification, my initial skepticism has turned into optimism.…
As a follow up to my post on Cognitive Computing, I wanted to give a functional overview of how the IBM Watson integration works and discuss some of the items I have on the backlog for this project. Overview The personality insights service aims to calculate personality characteristics based digital…
With the introduction of Salesforce Connect customers can de-risk integrations with external systems. However, in order to make use of this feature your data source must be OData compliant. In this post we discuss what the options are when your external system is NOT OData compliant. What is OData OData…
In this post we conclude the setting up of CircleCI for Salesforce. Overview The diagram below highlights how the different components are connected to enable the workflow described in part 1. Force.com Migration Tool The force.com migration tool is a Ant based utility that essentially allows us to…
In this 2 part series we will discuss the principles of continuous integration (CI) and how to set up CircleCI. What is Continuous Integration It is part of a larger concept commonly referred to as DevOps which is a practice that emphasises the collaboration of software engineers and other IT…
What the recent news of Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn means for Salesforce, and a look into what the future might hold for CRM. LinkedIn as a CRM LinkedIn is increasingly becoming the lead generation source of choice for many salespeople, not just recruiters. Whilst CRM goes beyond simple lead generation,…
As a Salesforce.com consultant you have probably heard the mantra before No code on this project! In this post we discuss when that approach can lead to a poor solution that doesn't achieve project goals and how you can get buy-in from key stakeholders when justifying writing code. Flexibility…
In this post I will discuss some of the alternatives to using Person Accounts and what the advantages/disadvantages are. Whenever a business operates under a B2C model its common for Salesforce consultants to review wether Person Accounts should be enabled. Lets quickly get an overview of the different options.…
A couple of months ago I started working on integrating IBM Watson with Salesforce. My original post described the overall design, in this follow up I discuss how to install and use the lightning component. Pre-requisites Knowledge of Apex and the force.com platform IBM Watson Developer Account - You…
On May 19th 2016, a sequence of events perspired that would forever change the way customers view the Salesforce platform. Ok, thats a bit dramatic, nonetheless an outage occurred on the NA14 instance effecting millions of customers for well over 10 hours. But more significantly this was the first outage…