Salesforce Data Masking Courtesy of PlatformDemos.com

My most recent discovery – and to judge from the naming conventions of the users you’re assigned when using it, I’m relatively early to the trend — is PlatformDemos.com

They have lots of different fancy, often expensive licenses to choose from, and you can spin up a scratch org of even apply it to an existing org. Searching for Data Mask options brings me here.

And I chose to spin up a new demo org, which does this:

And using the link at top, voila! A new org with all kinds of fancy licenses.

Navigating to the Data Mask App, Masks Tab

And clicking through to the Sample that PlatformDemos.com configured for me,

The sample only masks Contacts. Clicking through to configuring Contact, takes us here

This Salesforce Help Link explains what options are available for the mask. After we review and understand what’s going to happen, we run the mask, which takes some time. Over about 30 minutes, a number of Apex Jobs are run.

And if that seems overwhelming, the Run Logs tab and Object make it a bit easier to understand.

Some anodyne case comments I had made on this case have been scrambled beyond intelligibility, not least because of the truncation involved.

And what seemed a little abstract on Trailhead

Which the fine print here makes clear requires permission sets that are paid for is now much more concrete.

And look at all these other nifty apps with licenses to play with over the next 4 days!

NKF Userbase Notice Demo Page

/Hello, Sunshine! And welcome to the first Autumn workweek of Standard Time. We know you’re well rested. Another big shift in your work-life this week is this, the new NKF Salesforce platform, NKF NPSP (Non-Profit Success Package).

National Kidney Foundation Logo

Welcome to the NKF Salesforce NPSP Org. We’re happy you’re here.

Azure Logic App: Iterating Through New York Times Comments

screenshot of azure logic app dashboard

I’m a diehard New York Times reader. It’s been a life-long habit, and one that’s grown more emotionally fraught these past few months. This cloud automation is one near and dear to my heart: for an article or op-ed piece I find particularly interesting (or whose user-contributed comment corpus strikes me), I paste that article URL into an Office 365 Form as the trigger, and then SharePoint and Logic App go and gather the comments and log them in SharePoint.

Click on the image or here to launch the Sway.

Thoughtful and Shrewd: How Salesforce Supports Its Varied Userbase

Salesforce is arguably the most customer-centric company. Regardless of how one would measure that across contexts, it’s clearly overwhelmingly central to the brand. And philosophical quibbling at the margins aside, it’s far from an empty brand promise.

As they run their own business on their own platform, you get to participate in their success. When you configure Community Cloud, it’s such an awesome product because they support their own customers on it – and that is a large community.

Key to that is not treating users as one undifferentiated mass. They segment things, and you can see the differences in the users each segment is tailored to from the language and often times also the visual gestalt. This happy state of affairs leads to positive feedback loops that drive the impressive quarterly and annual results they consistently report.

This is a Sway I prepared for a training session for a client organization that was new to Salesforce. It’s an overview of Salesforce’s various public-facing and customer-only endeavors.

Click on the Image to Launch the Sway

Power Automate for Analytics and Reporting on Microsoft Planner

Screenshot of Testing planner at SAP Demonstration Digital Assets
Test Plan at SAP Americas Digital Demonstration Assets

MS Planner is a Kanban project management tool that integrates closed with Microsoft Teams and uses Azure Active Directory and Office 365 Groups for membership, identity and permission granting. I admire Nadella’s Microsoft immensely. Some of their offerings like Sway are quirky and lovable. Planner, their Kanban-interface project management tool is visually appealing and slick. But as this project proved definitively, it’s API leaves something to be desired.

SAP used Planner to track the 28 global business units served by Demonstration Digital Assets, a team of almost 500 staff and contractor professionals who develop sales and marketing video collateral to be used in SAP marketing efforts. There were about 1,000 videos in production or recently launched, and the manager of Digital Production wanted a way to track videos down a sequenced development path whose stages were identical across business units.

The 28 Plans

The legacy approach relied about end of week manual updates to a very large excel spreadsheet that integrated portfolio progress across the Planner Kanban, logged snags and changes in notes, and displayed over 60 attributes per video – to say nothing of joining viewing analytics statistics from the video serving platform, Kaltura. The legacy approach was to manually track the end-of-week state of the portfolio in excel, and use PowerPivot for analysis.

They wanted to Power BI for reporting and we had to migrate the data structure and monitor the portfolio of videos in Planner using SharePoint lists that held data updates from Planner via Power Automate. The only problem was the Planner API did not monitor for state changes from bucket to bucket (as the steps in the path were known). It only monitored the creation of a task, the assignment of a task to users, and the completion of a task.

Worse, because many tasks had more than one assignee, and assignee responsibility in a project management tool is, unsurprisingly rather important, there was no way to output a video-only representation of things: each row tracked was a video-assignee conjoint pair, on average 1.7 per video. So considerable overhead was spent in determining which rows had the privilege of being the primary mapped one to the video.

It’s one of those situations where as your formulating your requiremetns and your strategy, you’re wondering to yourself: the API can’t be that bad. And then you discover others have been grousing about your pain points since 2018, which in cloud time in unconscionably long.

C’mon, MSFT. You’re better than this.

Learn more in this sway.

View The Sway

#Dreamforce goes All Touchy Feely

With Marc & Arianna Huffington’s CEO fireside chat. Blather. Blather. Boil & trouble. Filled with gems such as these. Mind you I still respect the Company and the platform, a lot. But WeWork has demonstrated the difficulties with viewing private companies as social movements writ large.

It’s important to do things together.

Mark Benioff, Dreamforce 2019

When we reconnect with ourselves, that’s when community flourishes.

Arianna Huffington, Dreamforce 2019

<cringe>

Mega Migration Project: Dynamics to Salesforce Cloud for DHS USICS

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve started as a Salesforce Admin & Junior Developer for many-month migration project for a rather DC-heavyweight client: US Department of Homeland Security’s US Immigration & Citizenship Services.

E-Verify – Put into Place in the late 80s to keep employers from hiring ineligible workers.

USICS consists of approximately 19,000 federal employees and contractors working at 223 offices around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Citizenship_and_Immigration_Services

About 500 of them work in call 3 centers tending to the case management and efficient stewardship of the process of naturalization, and verifying that US citizens are legally authorized to work by virtue of that citizenship..

The E-Verify program I’m working on produces Employment Authorization Documents (EAD) for would-be employees seeking to prove that they can be hired legally. And Salesforce will be helping those call agents at every step of the way.

While I wait for my Public Trust Security Clearance

I can’t personally log in to any system with production data in it. So I spend my sprints vetting/validating field mapping documents, and getting into spirited and healthy debate about what real world situation is being modeled, and what are the best data types to use — you know the sameness-but-strongly-different fault line that often cleaves software targeting the same markets & domains. And then, I can that the results of our debate and appropriately tool the metadata of Salesforce to house first testing data, and then by the time there’s production data, I’ll have my Clearance.

That’s it for now.