Remember the cellphone you had in 2014? How high tech did it feel? How smart was it? Did it make your previous phone look like something from a time capsule?

At the time, it’s likely that it felt cutting edge, and you couldn’t imagine anything better. It’s also why you most likely gave it a pass for lacking features that are standard today.

But compare that phone to the phone you have now. Is it still up to date? Is it still the best way for you to make calls, texts, watch TikTok, and all the other things a phone can do? Or is it missing some key features?

What about other innovations in tech? Are there technologies that didn’t make the improvements phones did in the last decade? Have we gotten used to some level of stagnation in our tech?

DevOps for Salesforce

About a decade ago, DevOps emerged as a potential way to manage Salesforce. DevOps apps attempted to bring the core concepts of DevOps — CI/CD, version control, automated code promotion — to the Salesforce platform. It promised to give developers the ability to manage Salesforce like software. Yet, it would still be years before DevOps tools would gain real traction with Salesforce customers because Salesforce is a “clicks, not code” platform primarily managed by admins not developers.

As we look through some of the key evaluation points of DevOps tools for Salesforce, it feels like things are a bit stale. In the years since the creation of the DevOps for Salesforce, is this the best we can do? Why are there still rigid configurations and bottlenecked developer-lead deployments? Why are admins, business analysts, and project managers excluded from the conversation because they don’t have the same level of experience with DevOps? Where is DevOps for 2021?

Low-Code DevOps for Salesforce

Salesforce gives anyone the ability to build powerful solutions with a couple of clicks, but these solutions are no good if you can’t get them into production. Unfortunately, with traditional DevOps solutions you can only complete Salesforce change requests as fast as your developer team can work, which creates a bottleneck in your release cycle. What’s more, wasting expensive developer hours on Salesforce configurations that could easily be made by less technical users if given the right tools and guardrails really adds up.

To unblock the release process and empower more people to innovate on the platform, we need to change how we think about DevOps for Salesforce. It’s time for a new set of rules:

1. Time to Value is Everything

Every industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and companies are rushing to meet changing customer expectations faster than their competitors. Like any new tool, implementation time is a large factor of success. Salesforce teams with growing backlogs cannot afford to waste months implementing a tool. They must be able to begin running deployments and tests within days, or even hours.

2. Easy Enough for Even an End User

DevOps makes it easier to manage Salesforce workflows. But code-heavy DevOps tools are complicated, and inaccessible to most Salesforce administrators let alone business users. It’s not realistic to expect non-developers to use a command-line interface or navigate a version control system. Instead DevOps tools should be designed with the least technical user in mind with an intuitive, point-and-click UI that enables the whole team to manage their workflows directly within Salesforce.

3. Must Work Out of the Box

Every customer tailors Salesforce to their unique needs and business processes. Just as you wouldn’t buy an eSignature tool that would require you to completely redesign your sales process, you shouldn’t have to upend your existing processes or make changes to your data schema to use a DevOps tool. Your DevOps solution should fit you, not the other way around.

4. Flexibility is the Key to Agility

The types of solutions built with Salesforce are endless, so rigid tools just won’t cut it. A DevOps tool needs to work for your process today, and as your team grows. As your process becomes more fine-tuned, so must your DevOps. Don’t settle for a tool that forces users to go through the same rigid and heavy-duty process regardless of the size or nature of the update. DevOps should work to deploy your changes how you want, not force you to use their rigid process every time.

5. It Has to Scale

Speed is the name of the game, and repetitive, manual tasks cost valuable time. What good is automating a process if it can’t be reused? Salesforce teams can save time by determining the data and metadata to deploy once and then reuse, copy, and tweak the template. And as you customize Salesforce with new apps and functionality, your DevOps tool must be smart enough to understand the underlying schema changes and keep everything in sync. Another note to consider as your team scales is that the easier it is for end-users to make changes, the more efficiently your DevOps can scale as well.

AppOps: Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce

No one is using a phone from 2014 anymore. So why settle for a DevOps tool from the past? Prodly AppOps is DevOps built for today. AppOps removes the rigidity and clunkiness of traditional DevOps solutions to help teams be more efficient and self-sustaining and support you as you grow. A low-code solution for managing Salesforce changes, AppOps is easy enough for even end users to use, but powerful enough for the most sophisticated developer needs. In exchange, your team gets more power to make Salesforce work harder for them.

Duplicate effort is the bane of users everywhere and one of the biggest obstacles to adoption. And it makes sense. We’ve probably all experienced a new system roll-out, promising to deliver efficiency, ease of use, and of course management’s much-coveted reporting and metrics. But then, when it arrives, you’re left doing your job twice — once, the way you’ve always done it, and then again, entering what you’ve just done in the new system. It’s a recipe for reduced throughput and reduced morale, which is why it’s so important to make sure your systems actually benefit your users’ day-to-day.

Your data, straight into the format you need: Word, PDF, PowerPoint, HTML, and more — all with the click of a button.

That’s why Salesforce was built from the ground up to put customization and configuration front and center. So you can build apps and processes that match the way you do business, have a central source of truth, and never ask your users to repeat their efforts inside and outside of the platform.

 And now, that synergy is getting even easier — with Mambo Merge!

Generate Documents with the Click of a Button

Whether it’s Billing creating invoices, Sales creating quotes, Logistics creating BOLs, or HR creating employment documentation — if your users have to create Word Documents, they shouldn’t have to enter information twice (or rely on copy and paste). With Mambo Merge, one click will generate their document de jour, with data right from your Salesforce org.

 What that means theoretically is that there’s no more incentive to “shortcut” the process by “doing the doc first, while I have them on the phone — and then entering the info in Salesforce later” (a well-intentioned but rarely successful plan, as most admins can attest). What it means practically is that your users will thank you for saving them duplicated efforts, formatting headaches, and all that switching back and forth between programs.

All you have to do is take your existing documents, replace the existing fields with simple merge values, and add Mambo Merge to whichever Page Layouts your users need. All they have to do is click, and their document is automatically generated.

The Formats You Need

And, with the ability to output Word docs, PDF, PowerPoint, HTML, and more — your team’s ability to rapidly personalize and produce content will hit new speeds.

 Your sales team can instantly output their PowerPoint deck, auto-filled with the Opportunity’s company name, logo, pain points, etc… all straight from the record in Salesforce.

HR can tailor their onboarding presentations for new hires with the click of a button. Contracts, Statements of Work, Invoices, even personalized Websites for tech demos can be generated from your data and simple-to-setup templates, built straight from the documents you’re already using and, most importantly, it’s data secure.

Your Data Never Leaves

Unlike other doc-generation tools, because Mambo Merge is a Lightning Web Component that lives in your org, your data’s never exposed to anyone on the outside. All the magic happens right in your Salesforce instance, where your data is safe, secure, and under your control.

Available Now

Maybe best of all, Mambo Merge is available for free, right now, on

the AppExchange and the Pro Edition is free for 30 days, so you can explore some additional functionality before you have to decide if you need all the bells and whistles.

Installation only takes a few clicks and you can be up and running in no time.

And of course, if you need a hand getting up to speed, have ideas for additional functionality you’d like to see roll out in the future, or want some help configuring and customizing your Salesforce org to make your users’ happier and more effective, drop us a line! We’re here to help.

Until next time, keep working hard, smart, and happy. And we’ll see you in the cloud.

How many in-person, industry-related events have you been to over the past two years? I think there are some of you who will respond with one, or two. What I’m really expecting most of you to be thinking is, “I haven’t been to an in-person event in what feels like forever…but I really want to attend one and reconnect with people!”

For me it’s actually been five! One way back at the end of February, 2020, and the other four since October, 2021. And let me tell you something - it truly is great to be able to visit with people in person again. And it doesn’t really matter if that’s at an organized event, or even just your daily work life moving back to an in-office setting. There’s just something about the in-person experience that Zoom, Google Meet, Hopin, or all the other event platforms and apps have yet to successfully recreate. It is what I like to call the “random collision” - that feeling you get when you run into someone you haven’t seen in a long time, and perhaps you didn’t even know they were going to be where you are at that moment.

Do You Have Time for a Coffee?

If there’s one good thing that has come about since the beginning of the Covid-19 era, I think it’s that people generally place more value on face-to-face interactions. We used to take those for granted, but now we cherish those moments and look forward to them taking place again and again. “Oh my goodness, <insert any one’s name>! I didn’t know you were attending <insert an event or meeting name>! Let’s catch up over a drink!”  … Or a meal, a walk around the block, a leisurely stroll through a shopping mall - it doesn’t really matter what, let's simply have a conversation where we both aren’t staring into a computer screen.

Get Your Coffee Brewing

So why is now the perfect time to plan your Community Events strategy? Here’s my top 3 reasons for attending Community Events:

1. Connections: To meet people I know through the Salesforce Community, but haven’t yet met in person yet. Think of the online community as your starting point to building relationships and in-person events as the cement that helps create a strong foundation for building your personal community. 

2. Education: In-person Community events often have some of the best and brightest people presenting on highly relevant and timely topics such as how to deal with Salesforce deprecating Workflow Rules and Process Builder.

3. Apps: In-person Community events always have sponsors showing off their products in an expo hall. One of the greatest things about event sponsors and expo halls is the ability to see apps in action...to discover a solution to a problem you might not even have realized exists for your company.

Mogli & Community Events

Mogli is proud to join the ranks of the awesome companies sponsoring Cactusforce. MoglisSMS is the most robust and user-friendly native text messaging solution on the AppExchange. But why should you use text messaging? How about 98% open rate & a 45% response rate? That’s a metric email just can't come close to. 

Whether you are attending Cactusforce in person, or virtually, please join us at our 602 Talk on Friday, January 21, 2022, 10:50 AM 11:00 AM MT (Arizona) to learn more about how SMS can benefit your organization and your customers. Not attending Cactusforce? Don’t worry, you’ll find Mogli at other great Community Events like Higher Ed Dreamin’, Northeast Dreamin’, Texas Dreamin’ & more, throughout the year. Can’t wait for the next event to see Mogli? Get your demo now! 

Eric Dreshfield

Product Evangelist & Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame

The Salesforce environment is no longer the sole domain of one person or one team. The clicks, not code movement has expanded the responsibility of platform configurations, app development plans, and releases of new features or capabilities across the business.

Why is release management support essential for low-code app success, no matter which methodology you choose?

As the premiere DevOps for Salesforce solution, Prodly is excited heading to Phoenix, Arizona for the Salesforce Event of the Southwest in the Phoenix area, Cactusforce!  

After over two years away from in-person Salesforce events, we are excited to be able to see so many of you face to face, and even more of you virtually.  We are eager to be back to share with you our Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce to help you better manage your low-code Salesforce Apps.

Prodly enables Salesforce teams to increase productivity 65-80% while reducing risk up to 30% by putting next-generation DevOps into the hands of admins and citizen developers. By reimagining the change management experience, Prodly’s AppOps suite delivers greater business agility and governance without straining IT. With solutions for release management automation, version control, sandbox seeding, data migration, and regression testing, Prodly AppOps sets the standard for low-code DevOps and can be implemented 20 times faster than traditional applications. 

Prodly powers change management workflows for high-growth and Fortune 100 companies, including Cardinal Health, Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Verizon. The company is privately-held and based in Palo Alto, California with global operations. For more information, visit prodly.co, or if you are in person at Cactusforce, stop by our booth to see how Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce can help you improve your Salesforce Change Management.

Prodly AppOps - Next Gen DevOps for Salesforce

Now admins and developers alike can quickly and efficiently deploy, configure and test Salesforce data.

At Slalom, personal connection meets global scale. We build deep relationships with our clients in over 35 cities across the US and around the world, while sharing insights across markets to bring the full breadth of Slalom's expertise to every engagement. Our regional Build Centers are hubs for innovation, attracting top talent to rapidly co-create the technology products of tomorrow. We also nurture strong partnerships with over 200 leading technology providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Tableau.

Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Slalom has organically grown to over 7,500 employees. We were named one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2019 and are regularly recognized by our employees as a best place to work.

Slalom Phoenix, located in the heart of Scottsdale, is home to a growing number of the most talented Salesforce professionals in the valley. At Slalom, Salesforce professionals are able to further their experience on the core platform through enterprise implementations as well as receiving training on specialty clouds (ex: Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Field Service). Slalom Phoenix also conducts bi-weekly internal trainings on the latest technology and tools that the Salesforce ecosystem has to offer.

At Slalom Phoenix, we value collaboration with teams while encouraging team members to pursue their interests. With support from CTA’s, multi certified platform and system architects as well as a commitment of strong collaboration between Slalom offices, there are many opportunities for growth, education, and passion.

Slalom has been recognized by Phoenix Business Journal as one of the valley’s “Best Places to Work” in 2018 and 2019. We have also earned the Salesforce Partner Innovation award for 2018 and 2019 as well as being the #3 Global Salesforce Partner in the ecosystem.

As a commercial PDF SDK vendor, we have several clients developing web apps for the Salesforce platform. And one commonly mentioned frustration was the challenge of embedding PDF & MS Office viewing, editing, and annotating functionalities. This has historically proven difficult due to most web document solutions being dependent upon server-side technology while requiring MS Office licenses.

Working with these clients we therefore developed a Salesforce-specific build of the PDFTron WebViewer SDK, a pure client-side JavaScript library to view, edit, and annotate documents without needing MS Office licenses. This Salesforce-specific build of WebViewer easily integrates into your application as a Lightning Web Component, and is optimized for Salesforce’s 5MB static resource file-size limit.

Working around Lighting Web Component (LWC) Restrictions

While Salesforce includes a few PDF offerings, clients have found these less than optimal, often due to Salesforce restrictions on what, where, and how files are hosted within the LWC framework.

What: Salesforce requires that code used in Lightning Components be made up of only HTML/CSS/JavaScript, not native code.

Where: LWC can only use files hosted on the Salesforce platform, not on third-party servers.

How: Files hosted on Salesforce must be less than 5 MB in size, yet PDFs are commonly much larger and thus need to be broken into smaller chunks.

Designing a Salesforce-specific Document Solution

WebViewer is uniquely suited to Salesforce in that it runs entirely inside the modern desktop browser. As pure client-side JavaScript, it does not rely on external servers -- or deprecated plugins available only on older browsers. And as a WebAssembly/Asm.js port of the commercial PDFTron SDK (in C++) WebViewer SDK delivers almost all the same native document functionality, including document editing, redaction, conversion, and more.

The result is that you can open, view, annotate, and save PDF and MS Office (DOCX, XLXS, and PPTX) documents entirely within your Salesforce app without anyone requiring MS Office software or MS Office licenses.

Indeed, since WebViewer uses the PDFTron SDK, it uses the same high-quality rendering engine; you can display documents in all browsers accurately and fast. Likewise, you have access to hundreds of unique PDF SDK features. This along with WebViewer’s open-source UI means you’re free to customize the functionality, behavior, and appearance of the viewer as much as you’d like.

Lastly, WebViewer comes with a built-in optimization script to break up large documents into chunks to get around the 5MB limit on hosted files and ensure overall improved performance.

We are committed to helping Salesforce developers bring best-in-class document experiences to all their users through modern web technologies. And that’s why we’re a proud sponsor of Cactusforce 2020, where you’ll be able to meet with our team and receive a personalized demonstration of the PDFTron WebViewer. For more information on our Salesforce WebViewer integration, check out the documentation and accompanying guide.

See you in Phoenix!

Customers are innovating on Salesforce as part of their digital transformation journey. A major digital transformation could put your company on the path to minimizing costs, enabling better decision-making, and improving customer experience. Some of the steps along the digital transformation journey can include implementing Salesforce Customer 360. Other typical steps along this journey include mergers and acquisitions, Lightning Transition, compliance initiatives, enhancing Salesforce Shield, org migrations, integrations, and sandbox development, testing, and training.

During the process of building or expanding digital transformation projects, accidental data loss and corruption could happen. If unnoticed, lost or corrupted data could negatively impact your digital transformation. 

Digital transformation relies on accurate and available Salesforce CRM data...as do winning sales departments! That’s where OwnBackup comes in to help shore up your digital transformation.

OwnBackup is on duty 24/7 in case something goes wrong during one of your transformational projects. We give customers peace of mind by:

• Minimizing data loss risk and costs

• Maintaining regulatory compliance

• Addressing enterprise data governance

• Aligning with business continuity strategies

• Meeting standard enterprise RPOs and RTOs

• Maintaining full relational data integrity

Meet with us at Cactusforce to learn more about OwnBackup’s comprehensive Salesforce data protection and business continuity solution.

Is your sales team facing friction and delays turning a Closed-Won Opportunity into money received in your bank? Is your finance team wasting valuable staff time chasing payments and entering data manually more than once? Connecting your sales team to your finance system allows for a clear, streamlined, and automated process.                                                 

Breadwinner is a powerful two-way integration solution that connects Salesforce to your finance software–QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, and Stripe. Its intuitive technology allows businesses to increase productivity, accelerate cash flow, and improve decision making and helps to bridge the gap between sales and finance by providing in-depth visibility to critical information. 

See us at Cactusforce!

Test as quickly as you build.

That’s the new normal. Testing used to be thought of as an afterthought and something relegated to one of the most forgotten parts of the product phase-gate process. Now the paradigm has changed in order to help teams get new ideas to market more quickly. How? By integrating testing throughout the DevOps process. 

Within many organizations, it has become apparent that with a finite amount of resources and an increasing need to shorten the release lifecycle, testing needs to be integrated with the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) tools that teams are using. 

Related to this, we’ve been consulting with a lot of customers with the aim of helping them accelerate testing and bring this approach earlier and more frequently in the development lifecycle. What we have learned is that most teams have the experience and skills to make this happen. It’s really just about starting a dialogue internally to set an organization up for success and align priorities. 

Based on these conversations, here are a few best practices that we have developed to help teams start to think about the Salesforce DevOps planning process in a proactive way. By having these important conversations early and often, you can work together to release software faster and more reliably with DevOps in mind. 

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about creating more tests, it's about creating meaningful tests that truly protect the most important parts of your business.

Questions DevOps and QA teams should discuss during every Salesforce DevOps planning meeting:

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1. Should we test all new functionality early and at each stage in the deployment process, or wait until it reaches a higher level environment (such as a UAT or staging environment)?

2. Should we perform regression-based testing on all existing functionality and how often do we do this regression testing?

3. Do we only test this feature at the end of a release cycle?

4. How much time should we spend dealing with test data each week?

5. How much time should it take for a single line of code to go from Development -> Production?

Every organization has its own development and testing goals and objectives. That’s why it’s important to start an internal dialogue to discuss your development objectives and talk about creating a testing strategy that can support those goals. 

Learn how you can test as quickly as you build with Provar. Come say hey at our booth at Cactusforce! 

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We designed Provar to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably with DevOps in mind. With Provar, you can bring testing earlier (and everywhere) in the DevOps lifecycle.

You can integrate Provar with industry-leading CI/CI partners like Salesforce DX, Docker, Apache Ant, Jenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, Azure DevOps Server, GitLab, Travis CI, TeamCity, Bitbucket, Heroku, Gearset, Flosum, Copado, Blue Canvas, and AutoRABIT. 

Stop by our booth at Cactusforce to learn how! Or, schedule a 1:1 demo with a Provar consultant at any time! See you soon! 

By Jon Robinson, Head of North America at Provar

The Salesforce platform is very powerful, but as Spiderman was told: “with great power comes great responsibility”. And whilst we can laugh or grimace at these OrgConfessions, there is a serious point here. Salesforce has the potential to transform your organization.

Take a look at the root cause analysis we performed on the OrgConfessions and you will see some common themes. Most of these confessions could be avoided with better analysis, architecture, and governance which is why we built Elements.cloud.  

Confession #404

I had a contract recently to work on expanding out the architecture for a Salesforce org at a pharma company. I asked who was administering the current build – Intern, in college, only other job was a server in a restaurant.

Confession #169

User did the MyDomain Trailhead in Production. So our Prod login was changed to kittiesarecute.my.salesforce.com It took a tech call escalated to Salesforce Tier 3 support to undo.

Find Elements.cloud at Cactusforce!

Strongpoint has created a wide spectrum of tools aimed at both admins and developers at all levels of ability which can be leveraged to automate much of the manual processes that impede their productivity on a daily basis.

At Stronpoint we say that we help Salesforce resources by augmenting their ability to:

1. Get their Org in Order

2. Keep their Org in Order

3. Prove their Org is Order

To do that, we automate and provide "living documentation" of the Org by continuously indexing the meta data. From there, we provide up to date and accurate dependency mapping of all components in the environment. This enables automated risk assessment and impact analysis so that developers can have the confidence that they can make changes with confidence and mitigate any concerns regarding technical risk, organizational risk and regulatory oversight.

The net result is that we routinely have administrators as well as developers report to us that they save as much as 25% of their time and increase their delivery of innovation by as much as 200%.

We are absolutely committed to making it easier to adopt and benefit from the Salesforce Platform by helping admins and developers create great Salesforce documentation.

Strongpoint is proud to be a sponsor of Cactusforce 2019.

Clean off the Shelf

Shelfware is the enemy of software success. Customers have a vision that they can't realize if they can't manage the regular deployment of transformation. When momentum is lost in the software release process, trust in the technology platform is the first victim.  This leads to investment being lost and it creates friction with integrators and turnover of internal staff frustrated with failure. Copado was started by two release engineers who were tired of manually executing deployments and wanted to find a better way to manage enterprise class deployments.  When you meet any veteran of major salesforce deployments and tell them you have a way to automate the process of deployment and continuous integration they instantly want to know more.

Copado’s mission is to enable faster, error-free digital and cloud deployments and upgrades with continuous integration (CI) technologies and agile cloud release management, all via an enterprise-class developer platform that is 100% native and fully integrated with Salesforce DX and Salesforce Clouds. Today, companies that use Salesforce and need help in optimizing their release management processes talk to us about best practices for their release management process. It is at this moment of digital transformation meets deployment that companies lean in and look at how to mature their release management process, so they can be confident in their ability to scale development on the platform.  

Best Practices

Customers are looking for solutions to their problems, one which will help them to follow the software development best practices, to have a traceability system and reduce time in all the release management steps.  Our best practices focus on trust, automation, optimization, security and escalation.  We work with large enterprises familiar with the usual pain points, struggles and challenges of Salesforce release management (changesets / ANT). These companies usually have: (1) the means to afford the subscription, (2) resources with the appropriate skill sets / knowledge required to understand, adopt and endure the learning curve and (3) maturity to apply the change management and adoption of the new tool throughout the organization; plus the biggest delays/pains when it comes to release management on Salesforce.

We help teams understand and deploy the best practices for a successful release.  The ability to manage user stories and make it easy to share with other developers is essential to building a solid development foundation. Here are a few key practices we have identified:

1. If you want to grow your development teams to manage for enterprise class releases, you need automation and the ability to compare code.

2. It is very important that developers have the ability to bundle user stories across multiple teams, so managing changes are essential for managing continuous integration and updates. This is important because every day that your code sits on the shelf, no one realizes the benefit of your innovation.  

3. We find that businesses with teams of developers that need to focus on the business growth and not on the headaches of deployments and testing of new features appreciate the benefits of setting up a world class release program.

Copado isn’t just a toolset (developers lean towards that, e.g. command-line, ant tool, or sfdx), it isn’t just a project management tool (like Jira, that middle managers live in), nor a set of processes (manual or automated), ​it is the only solution that provides a true end-to-end - User Story to Production capability. Our reputation and referencability as the most comprehensive suite is our advantage. The referenceability of the product ensures that customers can trust the automation, optimization, security and escalation solution we deliver to hundreds of enterprise class customers.

The Payoff

The greatest benefit of DevOps is time, even though everything that Copado does is technically possible to do manually, having a tool that does it automatically and in a trusted and repeatable way is extremely valuable to someone who knows the pain and risks of a failed deployment.

Developers appreciate the benefits of building a foundation that will allow teams to scale, based on high confidence in their delivery practice and this results in better service to the business. Once a team is working then you start to realize the real saving of a release management process. Copado is a true  investment; when using Copado the ROI will pay back the economic cost very fast.