Monthly Archives: December 2015

Manage Business Hours Holidays

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For this installment of my permission series we are going to review the Manage Business Hours Holidays permission.  Before we see what this permission allows a user to do, we first need to review Business Hours and Holidays as defined within a Salesforce organization.

Overview

Business HoursHoursOfOperation1

The hours when your support team is available to serve customers.

  • By default business hours are set 24 hours, seven days a week in the default time zone specified by your organization’s profile.
  • Several sets of business hours can be defined for an organization so that different service hours can be related to holidays, cases and other areas.
  • Salesforce automatically calculates daylight savings times for the time zones available for business hours
  • The Business Hours field cannot be included in list views or reports.
  • The Business Hours field can be added to CASE layouts to allow users to view and define a specific set of business hours to a case.
  • Business Hours on a case are automatically set to your organization’s default business hours unless an escalation rule associated with a different set of business hours is activated due to matching criteria
  • Escalation rules only run during the business hours with which they are associated
  • Business hours included in escalation rules must first be removed from these rules before being deactivated
  • Hierarchy of Business Hours:
    Business hours applied to a milestone override business hours applied to an entitlement process, which override business hours applied to a case. If no business hours are set on the milestone, then the Entitlement Process Business Hours are used. If neither the Milestone Business Hours nor the Entitlement Process Business Hours are set, then the business hours on the case are used.

Holidaysholiday1

Holidays let you specify the dates and times your customer support team is unavailable. After you create a holiday, you can associate it with business hours to suspend business hours and escalation rules during holiday dates and times.

  • Up to 1000 holidays can be associated with each set of business hours.
  • Holidays automatically acquire the time zone of the business hours with which they are associated.
  • You can only add business hours marked as Active to holidays.
  • Holiday names don’t need to be unique.
  • Report results do not take holidays into account.
  • A holiday can be set to recur on a specific day of every month (20th or first Monday, etc).

What Can You Do With This Permission?

A user with a profile or permission set having the Manage Business Hours Holidays enabled can do the following:

  • Define business hours
  • Edit business hours
  • Define holidays
  • Edit Holidays
  • Associate business hours to holidays

A user with the Customize Application permission enabled as well can also do the following:

  • Add Business Hours field to the Case Layout page
  • Associate business hours to milestones in entitlement process
  • Associate business hours with escalation rules
  • Associate business hours with entitle processes

References

Guidelines for Setting Business Hours
Set Business Hours
Setup Support Holidays
Guidelines for Creating Support Holidays

What is a citizen developer?

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The division between IT and business is blurring and organizations are seeing the rise of a new type of employee – the citizen developer.

A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. In the past, end-user application development has typically been limited to single-user or workgroup solutions built with tools like Microsoft Excel and Access. However, today, end users can build departmental, enterprise and even public applications using shared services, fourth-generation language (4GL)-style development platforms and cloud computing services such as Salesforce.1

Why have citizen development?

IT Departments are understaffed as business makes greater demands – with more work than they can handle due to inadequate resources and funding so IT focuses on the most critical business needs and allowing others to fall to the bottom of the pile.  Unfortunately those items at the bottom may never see the light of day.  Citizen developers have stepped in to fill this gap.  Use of low-code platforms such as Salesforce have improved operational efficiency, reduced time to market and increased employee productivity.[4]

DIY by SME’s vs. IT’s ability to capture requirements and execute solutions[2] – In some cases a technology solution can be easier to implement and be more on the mark if done by a citizen developer that has deep subject matter expertise on the business and issues being addressed.

Reduced Maintenance Costs for No/Low Code solutions – It can be quite costly to develop custom applications using code.  Usually the development team that creates the application doesn’t stay to maintain it and funding for ongoing maintenance usually dries up.  Citizen developed applications are largely no or low code solutions deployed on SaaS or PaaS platforms.  Such applications usually require less maintenance and can be easily enhanced.[2]

Tech savvy business users are here!  More technically savvy individuals are entering organizations in non-technology functions.  These individuals are interested in taking on more of a technical role.  Given the right platforms, processes and governance these users can become citizen developers.[2]

What’s the risk?

Citizen developers are concerned with solving an immediate problem.  This focus results in a solution that helps business with its issue but may also not fit well into the overall IT ecosystem.[2]

Important parts of the complete development picture are sometimes not considered or defined by citizen developers:[6]

  • Who will support the application?
  • What other tools and applications will need to integrate with the application?
  • If there are bugs or problems, what will the wider impact be?

Making it work

“If citizen development is done properly in partnership with the IT department, then that can work, “ says Mark Driver, a research director at Gartner.  “There is a distinction between people who develop unbeknownst to IT – we call that shadow IT – and citizen developers who work in partnership with IT.”[5]

IT departments will need to evolve to support the rise of citizen development in a way to minimize risk to the organization.  IT provide citizen developers with approved or sanctioned SaaS or PaaS platforms, set security policies, define best practices and take on the role of guardian and mentor to citizen developers.[6]

References
1: www.gartner.com – Citizen Developer definition
2: 4 Reasons Why Citizen Developers May Be the Next Big Thing in Application Development
3: The Advent of the Citizen Developer (graphic)
4: ‘Citizen developers’ are ready to fill the gaps in enterprise applications
5: Can citizen developers bring shadow IT into the light?
6: Citizen Developers will ruin software discuss

Meta What?!

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We have all heard about metadata but what is it really? Metadata is information about
metadatayour data.  Clear as mud?

Here is a simple example to help you understand it.

Here is some information ( 18005552354 ).  Just by looking at it you might guess it is a phone number but it could be anything – a phone number, an account number, a help desk ticket number, etc.

Metadata provides information about that data to help you understand it.

Phone: 18005552354       OR    Ticket number: 18005552354

Both “phone” and “ticket number” are considered metadata because it is providing information about that string of numbers.

Why is it important?Important

So big deal there is metadata.  Why is it important to have it defined?  Its importance shows up when you need to change something, fix a problem or bring a new person up to speed quickly.  You can also use metadata during future analysis and design activities.

A few years ago I moved into a new position where I was supporting an application built on Force.com.  Since I couldn’t find any documentation or only a few bits and pieces I turned to the metadata to understand things.

Ninety percent of the fields had no definition and many labels were not very informative.  So I had to reach out to a number of people and basically interview them to get the information I needed to understand the application.  If good metadata had been available it would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and effort.

Types of Metadata

Metadata comes in all shapes in sizes.  Just remember that it is information about the data or function in your application.  Below are a few types of metadata.  This is not an exhaustive list.

  • Meaningful Labels (used on columns, fields, tables, table relationships, etc)
  • Definitions (used to further clarify labels and other things)
  • Field datatypes (number, string, email address, text, percent, currency, etc)
  • Other field clarifications (unique, required/optional)
  • Entity Relationship Diagrams
  • Application documentation

What can I do about it?

As a Salesforce Citizen Developer document as you go.

Labels:  Make all names for objects, fields, validation rules, child relationship names, etc. meaningful so that users get a clear idea of what data is there or what function it performs by the name.

Descriptions:  If the component (object, field, rule, etc.) allows for a description, add one.  Be clear and concise but provide enough information for the user to understand what data it contains or what function is being performed.  DO NOT LEAVE BLANK.

Comments in Code:  Make sure anything coded (triggers, apex classes, visualforce pages) has comments sprinkled throughout explaining what the user is seeing.

Knowledge base:  If you have access to Salesforce Knowledge, add FAQ information, application documentation, details on processes and more.  If you don’t have Salesforce Knowledge, keep the information in a shared space using spreadsheets, documents or other formats.  Just remember to keep it up to date as things change.

metadata_blog_article

What situations have you encountered where good metadata was present or lack of metadata made the work harder?