Confessions

Thursday: Launch new feature
Friday: Discover and start fixing all the unforeseen damage caused by new feature #FML

User: I need to export a report to Excel to use the data in our meetingsWhen Salesforce incorrectly translates your process criteria when building the behind-the-scenes flow, causing your automations to fire at the wrong times based on the wrong criteria, triggering validation rule errors and preventing your users from creating records they could before…and the only way you find it is by magically tripping over it in a sheer stroke of luck. Like who would think looking at a Process in Process Builder “Maybe the criteria I wrote isn’t what’s actually being evaluated?!?”Workbench crashed in the middle of a small upload, so I had to hunt down the records that were created. Then I saved my file as CSV delimited which royally FUBAR’d it when trying to add all of the created IDs to a single file to then run the needed post create update.

We have a two character mydomain, trying to implement enhanced domains, and told by salesforce that we need at least three characters – no exceptions

I’ve done it before, I was a delegated admin. Was able to find someone who had the right custom profile, like a dept power user. Created a permission set with all the permissions I needed, assigned it to my user. Logged out as that user, logged in myself and got $hit done.

When you stumble across a bunch of standard fields that the previous admin set to Hidden for the System Admin profile………..

Head. Hurting. On a big project with 6 business units all using the same SF org. The PM on their side isn’t labeling our meetings or documentation according to business unit, and we’re finding ourselves having the same conversation with different divisions of the same business units. Things are getting lost or confused. To make matters worse, no one can articulate their prospecting or sales cycles.

End-user requests System Admin permissions so they can “mass edit” records.

When you’re distributing global accounts and you find one in “AustraliUnited Kingdoma”

I’m baffled. Got a Flow error at 2am when it tried to create a new Opportunity. The error was REQUIRED_FIELD_MISSING: Required fields are missing: [ContactId].
Like, that field barely exists.

When you take three days off, come back to work to find that a business user has granted themselves View Set Up & Config, Customise Application, View/Modify all Data (don’t ask how). Then they proceeded to add stuff to production. This is why I take their toys away from them.

Just had a process builder email alert go to ALL of our users instead of just the case owner

Users accidentally testing in production instead of the sandbox where the work is. Thankfully they used our test accounts because it generated email alerts to a lot of people.

Salesforce support sent me the equivalent of “turn it off and back on again” after I told them their initial instructions were wrong and contradicted their own documentation

Lack of documentation around what licenses support what features. This time around, it’s platform licenses and Salesforce Field Service, but it’s always a pain.

When you’re using an SAT/ACT Prep website to remind you how to do standard deviations for some code you’re writing and discover your code is right and the college prep website is wrong.

One of the craziest things I’ve seen in my org , I have One Object Called Zone, but when I’m trying to create a lookup field from another object I’ve found two Zone Object ,

Hard-coded IDs in Process Builder, also, process Builder instead of assignment rules, also Process Builder being Process Builder…

Users are requesting to use a sandbox AS production in order to use the live agent configuration we’ve set up in the sandbox but not yet deployed to prod.

(dev) because a 2 line addition to ORDER BY clause in a SOQL query will take 5+ hours round trip to actually get into prod, and you don’t have a new contract signed yet

A client accidentally (I hope) merged my @trailhead account into her brand new account. Therefore, lost my original account, my 5+ year badge count, and trailhead orgs. This rando now has all of my stuff and when I reached out to support they said there’s nothing to do. #askforce

While onboarding a team, a manager asked “Is this Salesforce loaded to our computers?”

To the surprise of no one, a client that did no training whatsoever, very little, if any testing, had a failed go live. Big shocker. The best part is half their sales team said they watched the recording I sent. Liars. I can track views lol.

I removed a custom permission set from our integration marketing “user” that was “Manage Salesforce CRM Content” – this prevented ANY individual user from activating a journey in marketing cloud. The generic description on that permission just has to do with managing libraries, and nothing in documentation jumped out to us that “MC connect user needs this or you can’t activate journeys

Working on a project for a sales instance and open the sandbox to find an NPSP org.

Making even minor changes to Approval Steps is like being pushed down an “UP” escalator covered in broken glass, fishing hooks and rock salt, while makes with your hands tied behind your back and your feet bound. But that’s just me..

The company is moving a business group to Jira for support from Service Cloud on next Monday and only today (The) is engaging the Salesforce team about it.

My toxic trait? building things in Prod

Been asked to recreate “A” report in SF, then being given “the” report as an Excel Worksheet, that has 18 tabs, the first 15 each constitute a complete dashboard, 5-6 charts per tab. The last two tabs explain the first 16. Best part, their instance will need some reconfiguring in order to report on half of the metrics in the worksheet as those data points aren’t being tracked in SF.

Mispellings in configuration. Looking for a group for a sharing rule, couldn’t find it. Object in group name misspelled.

When a stakeholder is updating multiple fields on 100+ Jira issues and you get an email for every field they update.

Custom surveys object in org with 393 fields, and all but 28 are completely blank. Fields include Question, Answer, Comment 1-40 as well as a version of each question for pretty much all the products we sell

There’s no documentation for Manufacturing Cloud and you have to quote an integration with it.

Just realized that Order Type may be one of the only Picklist fields to have no values whatsoever out of the box.

User: It’s not working.
Me: …. what is “it?

My client says they are too busy use Elements.cloud as they are trying to understand their org due to how to reduce tech debt. WTF!!!

Many fields duplicated for each record type. It was a nightmare to unpick because records had been different record types over their life so had entries in more than one of the duplicated fields.

Hard coded ids in a process builder

legacy metadata from way back in our org – custom picklist field Agreement Term on quote and price book. on quote the picklist values are formatted like “1-month”, on price books, “1 month” :slightly_smiling_face: its even funnier because you can see each field was created directly by a respective implementation team (zuora consultant and our e-sign consultant)
we never have the time to truly untangle this…

Client sends you opportunities that aren’t showing up on his kanban and they all start with the letter z, turns out he has 208 opps. I wish Kanaban allowed for more than 200

When you discover the consultants build 5 description fields on an object. One for each record type: Description of (RT1) and so on.

VP Sales asks for updated funnel reporting, I ask “what are you using to manage your team now?” and I get a link to not even a spreadsheet but a google doc…I built their reporting in Q4 and none of the pipeline for this segment has been updated in salesforce since end of Jan…When you try write code for something and then realize that the functionality already exists in Salesforce 90 minutes in

Client has 6000+ custom objects!!! Over 100 installed packages. BIGGIES like 5 FFDC products, Conga, Zoom, you name it… (they’re a brand name, so ya I get it, but good lawdy Object Manager is unnavigable)

Flow validations are the opposite of validation rules i.e. NOT(REGEX( FieldName , “^[a-zA-Z0-9_]*$”)) vs REGEX( FieldName , “^[a-zA-Z0-9_]*$”)

Poking around a new client’s org: found a Before Save Triggered Flow that Gets the Lead that fires it but then checks if a lead was found and if no lead was found, sets the created date. Ima let that sit with you all for a while.

Until recently, multi-currency org customers could add the CurrencyIsoCode to our packaged field sets. It appears that this capability has disappeared recently. This is very bad news if true. Why oh why would Salesforce take away this important capability??

When you realize that Process Builder flows will only run under the author’s account. If that person quits and their account’s deactivated – they just break. They can’t be re-parented and the default can’t be set.

Admin deleted the field. They should have read the description!!!

When installing software(which wasn’t pre-approved anyway by the CFO) in Sandbox and want to use an Integration user…Have to ask them 5 times how could I install using an integration user! Yes, I probably should have known how to do this but I’m a new Admin, manager left in December and I’m learning everything along with CPQ. URGHHHH, should we even have bought this program??? And, they ALWAYS want to get on a call !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“We need to make sure these items have CAD price book entries”
…..currency exchange rate not updated since 2016.

21 active process builders on the Opportunity object. 78 on the Case object

These records aren’t always being updated correctly and then see that there are THIRTY SIX process builder processes on that one custom object

That moment when you are super proud of the flow you are building, debug it and realize you need a tweak and then close the Flow tab by mistake…and didn’t save.

Flow Summer ’21 CRUC issues that you probably need to deal with today. One breaks Record Type lookups in Flows unless you set them all to system. The other breaks Flow if the user doesn’t have Apex invocable perms, probably related.

The standard Product Id field from the standard Product object is not available within Standard Report Types.

Client : images aren’t showing up correctly
Me: your Prod instance is pointing at the Dev S3 bucket
Client : What? Why is it doing that
Me: because you didn’t carry out all the post-deployment steps on Page 7 of the documentation I wrote for you

Found a SOQL Query and a DML statement in one For Loop. In a Trigger.

This field is called “Month_to_date_total__c”. It is populated solely with numbers. Data type: Text(18)

I guess something changed in the Spring release that impacted some Apex we have that’s triggered by a Process Builder. It closes out a milestone when reps first respond to the case. I was getting error messages that users don’t have access to that trigger. It worked last week, which leads me to believe it’s release-related. Anyone know what might have changed (before I spend all day in release notes)?

8 phone number fields on the Account object. Plus 4 from a managed package. 2 of the fields are lookups to…the Phone Number object.

Org uses ABS, but doesn’t use Account Teams. 7 years of data requires manual input to reflect Support Team member and Inside Sales Rep on account.

The standard Product Id field from the standard Product object is not available within Standard Report Types.

When you are a consultant and you have 50 hours of work in your customer’s sandbox and they accidentally refresh it.

When the sandbox the client gives you is shared with another consultancy doing their project and the report that worked on Sunday night when you finished debugging it doesn’t work on the demo Tuesday afternoon

All of my lookup components are now failing to save. It looks like this is due to Spring ’21 rollout. Anybody else seeing this?

You’re on a roll building a flow that’s not complex, but sort of tedious but you stop for lunch and come back to your page needing to reload, at which point you realized you didn’t save

At this client, they are running an integration from an Oracle Front-end. A big flat file is being dumped into their Production org. Then they blame the resulting numerous duplicate fields and records on “something that Salesforce is doing. Must be some trigger.”

A Salesforce Trainer I visited in Austria, told me “We have no plans to implement ‘Lightning.” We tested it and it ran very slow. “

There are several different custom fields in different objects named “ZIP Code” or include “Billing ZIP/Postal Code” There is even an object named “ZIP CODE.” There is NO explanation anywhere why was this was built this way. One of these ZIP Code fields is a Text (60) field, and this is where users have typed in “???”

Because our sales/finance teams were not willing to round our pricing to two decimals like the rest of the world, we had to create nearly 400 price rules and 1000 price actions in CPQ to manage 150 products. I pray for the poor sucker who has to manage this after I leave.

A mass email to Salesforce integration, using an AppExchange app has been signed off as being up and running. Six months later I arrive and take a look. The app is installed (and I know it, it’s a good product and integration app) but the client is still manually exporting from Salesforce into the mass email tool. I have no idea what the customer signed off on. What did app did think had been installed? What did they think it was doing? They’re literally using none of its features, but paying for it anyway.

Added a new Opportunity field to help with reporting. Ran a mass update to all Opportunities to populate that field, but didn’t disable any email alerts. The next morning, my inbox is flooded with, Why am I getting notified of every Closed Won/Lost Opportunity from 2007?” Thankfully, only internal communications were sent – nothing to customers.

Client has ZoomInfo for Leads, linked directly into SFDC. They export the leads/contacts assign them to people, send them spreadsheets and ask them to manually enter them back into the system

One of my bosses in the UK told me that (before the pandemic) working from home was not an option.. Now the entire company works from home. What a toad, and he was fired fired fired…

One of my clients has 80 odd users and each user is a Sys Admin, cos their sys admin does not understand the security model.

Had a user who could not see her data in a list view, but could see the individual records, said to me there is a defect in the migration. I checked and found the list view filter was incorrect

Client: It is 23/12 and we have a flow that we had to shut to off. Can you fix it by 12/24?

I’ll take your “Salesforce support is painful” and raise you a “Slack support is a slow painful death”

Me: Why can’t I subscribe to Platform Events anymore?
Support: Looks like you hit a governor limit around too many events being consumed in 24 hours.
Me: Bummer. What limit did we hit that I can monitor with the limits API so we don’t have this issue in the future?
Support (actual quote): “There is no way to monitor the High Volume Platform events limits from the org, you can reach out to salesforce support if you want to check the limits.”

One of my executives champions himself as a 30-year ‘true data scientist’ (leads marketing efforts) and yet cannot grasp the basic functionality of Salesforce report filters. He’s created more than 1.2k reports in 3 years in our production org and EVERY SINGLE REPORT includes filters for Lead Status and another custom picklist field even though essentially none of his reports filter by those fields in any way. He adds both fields and selects “All” on every report.

That special moment when you log into a #Salesforce org, to uncover not one…but TWO tabs for Dashboards.

Client testing sandboxes that are way out of sync from production

Need basic start-up help. we only have 4 users and we need to enter leads and keep up with everything we have done with each lead. Help please – need salesforce for dummies. We have not even started using it yet. We have not had any sort of training on how to use Salesforce.

Recently, a new #Salesforce Admin asked to help delete all existing records from the database, so that the company can start the fresh year with a “clean slate.” In their defense…this is the net result of a chaotic implementation (without a properly trained Admin), half-baked strategy, and like many organizations new to Salesforce, enthusiastically turned on every integration they could find while also bulk uploading lots of garbage spreadsheets of data into the system….creating a centralized heap of trash data that was impossible to sift through. Side note: They also renamed several standard objects (like Contacts and Opportunities), just because “they could.” The Admin explained that the team had exported all of the relevant records from Salesforce into Excel, and they’ve been spending significant time and effort cleaning up the data in Excel, which will be re-imported back into Salesforce now that their legacy database of crap is gone.

When you’ve had zero conversations with a client about SLAs/Milestones and they want to go live with them on Dec 28th.

client says that they can wait to figure out Profiles/Permission Sets/Sharing during UAT…

Launching a new service and I asked the PM what the pricing model is and she said they haven’t decided yet, “is there a workaround?”

Working on an Org optimization of a client that has 464 fields on the Account object. Another object has 4 date fields: Date, Date 2, Date 3 and Date 4. All but Date are formula fields with the formula Date__c.

Someone created a Lookup from Quote Line to Quote for the sole purpose of only displaying a subset of the Quote Lines in a related list. Like, no… and also, please use filtered related lists. Thank you.

SetUp a new PB: When checkbox marked as false create task… except it was supposed to true… and now every time that record is open it’s creating a new task bc the checkbox is false be default… thankfully I caught it before it ran too many times.

Recent Success Community post: How do I get upgraded to Lightning?

Went to create 7 new, long text area fields on our Survey object we are working to actually start using. Got an error that the object hit its character limit. There are 50 fields each for Question, Answer, & Comment. Comment fields have 15k+ limits. None of the fields are actually filled in (per Field Trip). Not 100% confident in deleting, so just gonna go modify 50 comments fields to only have 5k character limit

Accidentally deactivated a SF2SF connection only to find out that it can’t be “reactivated” without establishing a new connection. Salesforce Support says it’s expected behavior. Reconnection would lose the original data sync and introduce all new duplicates. A data disaster.

Went live with an email-to-case scenario this morning for one of our sales channels for what was formerly a distribution list. I see the cases being created and panic – why is every other distro list creating a case here? Ecomm order confirmations, support cases, yikes. Am I somehow diverting all emails to these cases? Turns out there is an employee on maternity leave who is cc’d on basically every company distro list who has forwarded her email to the distro list address that is now going to cases. Phew! but boy do we have issues with distribution lists.

Haha, I set up a validation rule on a picklist field, requiring a value that doesn’t exist in the picklist.

whats the most secure way to send a fax online. Yes I said it. Our government at work

I just found out someone added a multi-picklist to the Account object

Client : the migration script isn’t working, it didn’t move any attached images to Amazon S3.
Me: how many images are attached to that object?
Client checks: 0

AWS S3 integration works flawlessly in UAT, but errors on Prod and you triple check the Remote Site Settings and Named Credentials, only to eventually discover that if your AWS Secret in Named Credentials contains a / then it doesn’t get parsed correctly by Salesforce and AWS throws Access Denied

A user sent our support team an email saying “records are not getting assigned to me” and in the same email she referred to that “record” as an Account, Opportunity, Lead, and two separate custom objects of ours….

Found out towards the end of a large Service Cloud implementation that the client would have been OK with a phased approach (E2C first, then Chat, then KA). Oy.

Using multi-org strategy without a centralized code gatekeeping – like not utilizing Heroku for some of the commonly used functionalities, which results in the same logic being developed in different sprint cycles for the different teams.

2 -> 1 -> 2. A team spent half year to merge two unrelated orgs; then another half a year to separate them.

Multiple automation of single type in one object – say for example, 3 triggers on case, 4 process builders on opportunity. What we have achieved lately is having one PB per object and if needed calling the next PB from the main one.

With the salesforce orgs that are older than 7-8 years the entire logic required at the point of time was written in one single class. With business growing further in the years, the same class is being extended to 4000-5000 lines resulting in major test class coverage issues.

Test classes focused on the number of lines covered rather than giving equal importance to the positive and negative scenarios.

100% configuration: One contract requires the System Integrator to do 100% configuration. Oh, how creative we got with flows and all the wonderful config tools! But how do we create a JIT handler?

The bleeding edge. I was so excited with SFDX when it came out that I tried to package my Service Cloud app. On the bleeding edge, pain and gain go together. I still love SFDX.

“Create it just like our legacy sales automation system.” One org was almost all coding to mirror the legacy application.

Discovered that a flow built by consultants has the API name Final_Versions_of_Intake_Form which is not only vague and non appropriately descriptive, but final.

Inter-org Chatter? Yes, we can! But an enterprise team is not a product team: It does not pay to maintain such a complex custom solution.

A team put a package in its app design, because “They were so nice and knowledgeable. There is also enterprise license.” The real cost is how to make it work.

Triggers without handlers and custom setting / custom metadata combination to run the logic on demand based on the user logged in.

Client has a 40+ question survey and each question is a separate field, and each answer is a separate field. And they want to report on it, but service reports related lists only let you have 10 columns on a related list (not that it would render properly anyway) and their attitude to the design being fundamentally broken is “oh well, we’re stuck with it now” and won’t budge on getting it to be a proper related object with records for each question/answer pair…..

Using multi-org strategy without a centralized code gatekeeping – like not utilizing Heroku for some of the commonly used functionalities, which results in the same logic being developed in different sprint cycles for the different teams.

Many years before in one of my previous organization, we decided to have a Single Org for both Sales and Service Cloud users mainly due to common data and integrations. Unfortunately due to lack of good governance and the lack of flexibility from Sales team , the Service Cloud team eventually moved out of Salesforce and adopted ServiceNow.

Not having an architect or a developer with architect mindset in the team to foresee scalability issues. This results in the things getting developed in the configuration level which gets complex eventually rather than keeping the core logic in the Apex and keeping the controlling points at the configuration end for certain business scenarios.

How do I turn off the stinking annoying reminder to try lightning every time I login to Salesforce classic. Lightning sucks. It’s terrible. It is useless, it is over-engineered for purpose.

Due to the limit of our licensing AKA not being all to use the out of the box Opportunities object, I’m trying to create a custom Opportunities object with all the fields we need.

A customer asked me to configure their new Salesforce so it looked exactly like their old 13 year old legacy system. Puzzled, I asked if they liked their old system? They said they loathed it as it was hard to use and did not do what they wanted. So I asked why do you want Salesforce to be built like that? They said it would make user adoption easier …

6 Dev, 1 Sandbox, all dev uses the same user id / pw because of lic issues

I just found the following code: const that = this;

InfoSec got a scary report from people selling Salesforce security audits, but my InfoSec team knows nothing about Salesforce, so now I’m teaching basics over slack to a bunch of people asking me questions.

“Notify Case Owner on New Emails” fired 70 emails before you can turn it off.

When you are giving a high level overview of your Org to the acquiring company’s team and the they are clearly taken aback that your system is not integrated with an ERP

As a Salesforce developer I joined a project where it was a method with 600 lines of coder to enhance the test coverage of a apex class not longer than 500 lines of code, for example coverage(){ integer a= 1; integer b= 2; integer c = 3; integer z; z= a +b; z = b + c; (an so on an so on for 600 lines of code) }

Business Unit uses an Account hierarchy (for the last 2+ years) and you’ve spent 6 months on an enormous project for them that was only supposed to take 3 months (Due to massive oversight – The Managers bought very expensive data and didn’t realize that the vendor didn’t deliver the most important data point)and built tons of automations to automate the sales team’s entire workflow and now the Manager’s Manager wants to change the Schema and doesn’t understand why that would be a bad idea.

Created a custom object with fields.
Did not set Profiles to view the custom object tab.
Sent out mass email about the new custom object and tab.
Cue the emails “I don’t have this tab.”
Next 20 minutes adding the custom object to profiles.

Just got off a all hands call at work. We have been bought, and the entire executive team is leaving in January. Good thing this is my last week….Off to bigger and better things!

Installed a trial of some project mgmt app in SFDC. It expired over the weekend and proceeded to make it impossible to log calls and caused errors when Form Assembly tried to connect. This mornings treat: 246 emails of errors

I worked on a big org that many partners made some sort of development in there and among the dozens objects, fields, visualforce pages (that are still being developing old and new alike). The most headache I had was that for different record types and layout, there were fields with same label that showed for different layouts.

Our client received an email from Salesforce Security Review yesterday that their new version under review failed. Took a look at the report and the reason for the failure stems from an Apex class that is not in the managed package (nor does it exist in any of their packaging/review orgs. From google I stumbled across an old dev forum post containing the exact same Apex class; it seems to belong to another Salesforce ISV partner entirely. As hard as it is to believe it seems as far as I can tell that the Salesforce Security Review team mixed up our client with another partner (and ironically in so doing introduced a security vulnerability by sharing their code with us…)

Discovered a formula field that seems to convert phone number into text
RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(LOWER(Phone), ‘%’, ”), ‘~’, ”), ‘@’, ”) , ‘>’, ”) , ‘=’, ”) , ‘<', '') , ' ', '') , 'o', '') , '}', '') , '|', '') , '{', '') , 'z', '') , 'y', '') , 'x', '') , 'w', '') , 'v', '') , 'u', '') , 't', '') , 's', '') , 'r', '') , 'q', '') , 'p', '') , 'n', '') , 'm', '') , 'l', '') , 'k', '') , 'j', '') , 'i', '') , 'h', '') , 'g', '') , 'f', '') , 'e', '') , 'd', '') , 'c', '') , 'b', '') , 'a', '') , '_', '') , '^', '') , ']', '') , '\', '') , '[', '') , '?', '') , ';', '') , ':', '') , '/', '') , '.', '') , '-', '') , ',', '') , '+', '') , '*', '') , ')', '') , '(', '') , '&', '') , '$', '') , '#', '') , '"', '') , '!', '') , '-', ''),9)

Created workflow rule that changed Opportunity status. Didn’t realize that there was an overnight integration job that touched every opportunity and it kicked off the workflow changed every opportunity status to the wrong status.

Someone changed the label of the picklist value instead of creating a new value. Thought I was losing my mind since Approval Processes display the API value in the action criteria.

“We barely use Cases, so this project should be easy”
Cannot activate Workflow rule, max # of active rules on object
27 record types
30+ layouts
Hundreds of fields
Tons of code & processes conflicting

Users are putting street addresses in the Phone number field. And also found user putting extra emails in mobile number for safe keeping so they don’t lose them

New Client: We had a huge project on hold to come up with a major digital transformation for our customer experience, that won’t happen until next year. We need something by Dec 15th to show we did something this year

On the last week of November the Executive team had decided two weeks ago that they wanted to change the fiscal year, and add a week to November, taking one from December.

I have an integration that went wrong and now have a lot of orphan contact records, they need to be person accounts records.

My whole professional life, developers are not given access to production. The company I’m at now, likes to hand out admin access like hotcakes. We have 100 users and 15 with admin access.

I remember going into an org. The Contact record had a check box field for every event the contact had attended.

New org I just inherited had ISBLANK(Name) on a Validation rule (among 60+ rules on the same object, mostly ISBLANK based on a value of a picklist field…).

Used 5,403,900 of Apex characters of the available 6,000,000

Just found a field on Opportunity – Quoted Total. It’s a rollup summary of the Total Price of all Quotes.

Created Mobile App to restrict access to a couple of objects. It resulted that the app has search functionality which let users access all the objects they aren’t supposed to view.

We changed an object’s name to other name due to a new cloud integration. But the report related to the old object is broken. Does anyone knows how to re-parent to the new object?

Partner did implementation and left no documentation

Partner fixed an issue directly on your production environment instead of the provided sandbox, but they can’t/won’t tell us what it is they changed.

Hello. I am an extreme newbie. I am looking for more information on the app Field Service. I am trying to learn as much as I can before our company goes live with this specific app. Are there any Trails I am missing that go into more detail?

At one of very first sales roles we would create quotes in this “official” excel template and PDF them and send them out. I was new and I didn’t realize I was supposed to put the contract duration in months and not years (12 months vs. 1 year) so the pricing I sent to my customer was 1/12th of the real price.

I once heard of a company who didn’t bill a recurring saas product line for over a year because the billing rep responsible for billing that product left the company and he was the only person who knew how to calculate based upon the manual contract reviews and spreadsheets. The process was so manual that nobody noticed until there was a multi million dollar gap 18+ months later. So much opportunity for revenue cloud.

Spent NINE stressful weeks building a end to end process to automatically route Accounts to Queues, including: A Prospect Rating System for Accounts (which will determine which queue the go to),a custom object to use as the proxy for Accounts, a custom version of Assignment Rules, an Omni-Channel Setup to route said Custom Object according to the Custom Assignment Rules, Batch Apex to get around issues caused by using a scheduled flow, New Process Builder Nodes and 7! New Flows. Only to have the powers that be decide that we’re going to manually assign 10 Accounts to Reps every day for the time being instead of using the Process I spent all that time building

I see this from Salesforce Support when a case is closed, “I will now close this case. Please reopen if it is not resolved to your satisfaction.”; however, I don’t believe we have a way to reopen cases?

Using excel to manually migrate an entire CPQ implementation to Production is my scariest story!

New admin quits 3 weeks into the job because they said the Org was too complex.

The worst manual entry I ever saw was in a previous role running a global billing team. The revenue recognition process was hideous!! We’d do the billing run, then make an export of the data from the ERP we used at the time into a spreadsheet, and manually calculate the amounts to be deferred, then look at another spreadsheet to create a journal for that months revenue to be recognised. One mistake was very costly to our figures being reported at month end!! Thankfully we automated that process in the end.

BIG ORG. Opportunity has 276 Record Types and 140 picklist fields so grid of assignments is over 5 million records…. And they have 76 Opportunity processes. BTW all the other key objects are like this. Lead, Account, Contact, Case.

In my former life in Sales Ops, I was covering the deal desk on December 31st and got a call at end of day on one of our biggest deals. The AE wanted to add a line for professional services to the quote. I added it as a line on the bottom — and for those excel nerds — I *gasp* didn’t check my sum function since I was in a hurry. Quote went out without the line items adding up in the total… the customer signed because we didnt catch the error. I book the deal and finance rejected it because of rev rec implications on professional services as a $0 line item. I had to call the sales rep who was celebrating in the customer’s parking lot to say we couldnt book the deal and they would not be paid on it if it didnt close today. They had to run back in at 7 pm at EOY to get ANOTHER signature and was embarrassed to explain it to a customer (and furious with me). Good times….still have nightmares about new line items and SUM errors in Excel!!

Salesforce recently stopped it’s data recovery service, right ? You know, when someone at your org screws up and deletes things that should not have been deleted…and that data isn’t in the recycle bin….you could get Salesforce to recover it for a HUGE price. Right? They stopped that not too long ago, right? When was that? Anyone have a link to an article about that?

Updating 111 page layouts with notes & attachments related lists with files related lists

We have a workflow that looks to see if a custom date field called Create_Date__c is blank, and if it is, populate it with the Create Date.

On a Salesforce support call and the first response from the Salesforce rep is to create an Idea. Did my best to contain my rage while I listed out all of the reasons why broken functionality is not an Idea and state that if it is expected functionality, I want the documentation. Also, trying not to laugh when the agent suggested that maybe my issue had to do with the default field update user – which is not a thing! Fortunately, he didn’t protest when I told him as much.

Sales department is on its 3rd manager in 4 weeks, and all 3 have had me rebuild the Sales Process (and all associated logic). 4th manager is incoming…

One time I thought I made a change in Salesforce full copy and it was actually…Production environment . Lucky for me it wasn’t a big change and I didn’t get fired from my job haha

When you get Management sign-off to consolidate 40 Validation Rules into 2 Rules and the Sales Management decides their team needs specific messaging instead of 2 generic messages.

Was sent to their HQ for training, at a 1.5 Billion € in sales, European-based company. Was told by the Salesforce Product Owner, “We have NO plans to migrate to Lightning as we tested it and it was too slow.” Their System Administrator, “Only two objects can be related in a report.” With people like this, no wonder their SFDC implementation has failed miserably!

I’m currently on my 9th Managed Pacakge build request… something’s borked in our post install script and I’m (very, very) slowly going insane.

An automated email goes out every time a big order is closed. Owner of the company wants this email to contain a summary of the products on it. Because of how our products are set up this can’t be done in an automated email, so it has to be un-automated and manually done.

We have multiple apps with 20 custom objects and automation that have been built that have never EVER been used.

A completely hypothetical question… Asking for a friend… Let’s say a Salesforce admin created a public link to a library full of files and put the link on the Lightning Page for Opportunity so sales reps could access it, but then later realized that anyone with the link could access the files without authentication since it’s a public link… is there any way to tell if anyone not authenticated into the org accessed the files?

My wife works for a company that is switching to LX on Monday. I asked her, “how much training did the admin do?” Her response “She sent a 15 min video.”

Picklist value isn’t appearing, so I refresh a bunch blaming lightning UI. I then realize record type controls it…yup…added it there. Still not there! More refreshing while cursing lighting. It’s also a dependent picklist…add it and voila! …it shouldn’t be that hard…

Have a use case where I have to enforce that a multi-select value in one field is included in a separate multi-select. But both multi-selects have 96 values. Any ideas?

Anyone using SF Labs Dashboard Pal? With W’21 my users can no longer see the dashboards they have access to via this component and I can’t figure out why.

Winter 21 randomly removed a necessary controller from a profile. I’m a solo admin with no devs on staff and only the most basic understanding of controllers

Multi-billion dollar corp implemented CPQ directly into production.

My org is currently in code freeze until a new cloud go live. But today I deleted an inactive field which was a duplicate field. Because when we do date updating, the field was pulled due to the same API name. I am not sure if this deletion will effect the code freeze.

User: Can you please update these 30 records? Proceeds to send excel with 90 records. #whyadminsdrink

We have 8 Orgs, and I cannot see us EVER migrating them to Lightning as they are such a mess.

A large company has enterprise sales, B2B sales and support. Enterprise sales has an org, very complex and pushing limits. B2B sales has a separate org, implementing a simpler business process to handle many more customers. Support has a different org. One reason was that sales and support can’t agree upon what is an account. For enterprise accounts, each account has an account team and complex interactions. For B2B accounts, the focus is sales, so a billing account is an account. For support, an account is … complex based tiers.

When a single workflow takes 6+ weeks to be added in SANDBOX.

The reset password links never bloody work and just redirect you to the login page. If I knew the login, I wouldn’t be resetting the password.

Having 20+ record types on Case and not being able to submit picklist values by record type.

VP of Sales tells a member of his team to just close the Opportunity, and we’ll fix it later.

When the Apex error message is a big fat lie and you spend 3 days down a rabbit hole. The resolution was a 1-line fix.

We are a very small company with just 3 Sales Cloud licenses. I am the admin and have certifications, but my boss and another guy sometimes go in and change things without talking to me. When I started, everyone had admin access. There isn’t much hidden in the org, so that way didn’t matter, but I did try to stop everyone from access. But my boss (owner of the company) posts everyone’s password so everyone can get in. He wanted API access (we’re in Professional, as far as I know there is no API?) and he may have downloaded something without my knowledge, the Einstein Activity Capture. I’m all for it, but I wish they would talk to me and I don’t think he will. Then, today, between the 3 men, they decided to deactivate someone so that they could put someone else in, when in reality, my boss should buy more licenses.

Client doesn’t trust Salespeople to convert leads. Sales can’t even see the Lead object. So the Admin emails the Regional Manager when a lead comes in. The RM then SCREENSHOTS it and sends the information to the right Salesperson. If the Lead is legit, they HAND KEY in a new Account as a Prospect.

When asked to prioritize User Stories for an Org Optimization, VP of Sales ranked Adding Contacts to Accounts in Tier 2. Really? It’s a CONTACT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM!

Client *production* org – bunch of test classes that don’t even run without errors, code coverage at 59%. Again, a production org.

I have been using Salesforce for around 2 years with an administrator profile, so an ‘unofficial administrator’.

The setup wizard for an Einstein function allows you to add permissions and you add those permissions BUT takes them off as soon as you finish the wizard.

3 actions on a Case page layout all labeled New Child Case. The API names reflect 3 different RT yet somehow that clarity never made it any further.

My biggest pet peeve in my role. When the business comes with a solution but cant detail their problem: “We’ve decided that we need 10 fields on the account to capture blah blah blah.” “Whats the actual requirement? Why do you need them?” “Ohh excellent question, because we need 10 fields to store data.” “But what are you doing with them, what business process do they drive, what purpose do they serve?” “Stop overcomplicating things we need fields.”

I’m working on a Production Org right now that’s at 189% data storage last time I checked. I have no clue how it’s still even functioning.

Data Storage: 113% used. File Storage: 1% used. Data import fails; not enough space.

Got off call with client (not in the US). They were about to purchase on of the leading appexchange DevOps solution, but at last minute Salesforce Professional Services offered to build a custom dev ops app for them (I assume at very low cost as they are sitting on the bench). A few issues: 1. SF competing with ISVs. 2. SF has DevOps Center launching soon 3. How will they maintain app ‘cos you know there will be no documentation. 4. Risk, time and cost of build vs buy.

I would like help with obtaining a certification.

Joined a mid-sized Org of about 800 users and a relatively new but decent team that merged two Orgs that were pretty poorly managed before they inherited it. Heavy use of Service Cloud, specifically Cases and E2C, for Sales Ops teams to support the wider sales teams. It turns out there are about 11 ‘type’ picklist fields on the Case object. Type, Type__c, Type_Client__c, Type_Client_Issue__c, Type_of_Issue__c… etc. There’s hundreds of values, multiple picklist dependencies, a bunch of record types, tens of reports, processes, workflows, flows, support processes and layouts associated with unpicking it all. Argh!

Due to an integration error, one of the properties on salesforce is skewed and needs to be changed for each lead.

I have been working as our company’s Salesforce Admin for about a year and I just earned my Salesforce Admin certificate.

I know that Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups are the shiny new thing, but currently there is no way to add/remove Record Types from multiple Permission Sets or Permission Set Groups, or Mass Update Permission Sets or Permission Set Groups either, so as Admins we’re just as screwed there too…

Use FLS to turn off access to the fields and wait a month or two to see if anyone complains loudly. We use it in our Org, although it can be kind of wonky, Field Footprint missed 18 out of 744 fields). Field Trip missed 20 fields out of 744 fields. BUT THEY ARE FREE

When you find out a co-worker merged his trailhead account with yours.. I no longer exist.. Salesforce support case here I come…

Live Agent & Omni-Channel has been down in our UAT environment for the last 5 weeks. For a Project I’m working on, I need to key off of the Agent Work time for some custom routing. After 6.5 hours of digging, another Admin and I found that someone had left a half-finished process builder active in the Agent Work Object. Turned it off, and restored Omni.

About go live in 2 days. Client has said the org is greenfield. It is not. We have just discovered the changes we are making will break the org.

How is a client managing to create Apex directly into production? I didn’t think that was possible at all? What loophole are they using? We know for a fact they don’t use sandboxes and have only recently discovered what a changeset is.

That moment when you realize the “somebody” who buggered up one of your demo Orgs, was actually your own alter-ego. Time for bed

User just tried to create their own formula:
If((“Total Units Managed” < 2000 , "<2K") ("Total Units Managed" >= 2000 && < 10000 , "2K-10K") ("Total Units Managed" > 10000 , “10K+”))
Why do users have the ability to create formulas?
We’re experimenting with delegated admins.

I have a client who somehow managed to set the Task’s Subject field to Read Only. After reviewing about 75 Tasks from the User who reported a lack of access to the field, it became evident why the User had assigned all of the tasks with a Null Subject.

We have 23 Orgs and desperately need to consolidate.

Hi All, I’m stuck, and hoping for some insight. I have two multi select picklist on the Account object where we’re attempting to add new options. But they’re not showing up on the UI.

When eating skittles, there is an order I always follow:
Green
Yellow
Orange
Purple
Red
That’s just the way I do things. Now you know.

Our Head of Sales dumped Salesforce into the business in 2016, no training – we were just told to ‘add leads and opportunities so we have a pipeline’. 4 years later… it’s a mess and I’ve moved role from Account Manager to Salesforce Admin to try and sort it out!

I have just joined this lovely community and started learning about this amazing platform. The best thing is you can create multiple Apps and functionalities just with clicks.

Is there a way to change the API version on your data loader? My coworker just downloaded version 50 and it wont let him log into prod.

Just started working in an org where “open” opportunities are received and “closed” opportunities are not.

Anyone know how to fix the trailblazer.me issue of accidentally linking an additional account and having it wipe out your URL and certs? I cant re-authorize my certs to the merged account now, says its already in use.

Going through 119 process builders. Only 119? Our org has 160+.

Spotted in Chatter “Something is broken with the AppExchange, specifically the consulting listings. Yesterday the Expertise tab was broken, today it is showing 0 certified consultants on many listings. Are you all aware of these issues? Is this part of a release? If part of a release, why is it being pushed during business hours?” SF ans: “The issue was fixed yesterday. Thanks!”. Reply “Thank you for the response. I would have not published this comment today if the issue were resolved.”

Assigned ownership of a record in PB using the Queue operator, but when it moved between environments it causes invalid reference id errors causing testers to report UAT fails.

Found Dreamhouse app in an Org.

Created custom object to track people. I saw it in one of the orgs I was working in. Explanation given. It helps to save time to search People as compared to Global search.

When you assign ownership of a record in PB using the Queue operator, but when it moves between environments it causes invalid reference id errors causing your testers to report UAT fails.

I found a permission set called “User”.

Field labels don’t match across different features in SF. This is what I see in the Object Manager for the Contacts Object:

• Asst. Phone
• Home Phone
• Other Phone
• Phone

But this is what I see in the Front-End:

• Phone
• Mobile

And this is what I see in Process Builder:

• Mobile Phone
• Business Phone

Winter 21 broke 1-step password reset and email change and I have a bunch of users starting testing.

We have a wonderful SF Admin, and I was thrown into the CPQ Admin role and busted my ass to learn it on my own, rebuilt the whole thing myself because our vendor screwed it up on us and then walked away, and because our managers don’t understand how any of it works, they refuse to limit the 10 Admins we have in the system, and people just go in and create anything they want, without having a clue what they’re doing or what else they are affecting. The system is a total mess now, and we can’t figure out half of it, and every time we try to fix one thing, something else breaks.

I was helping (only helping – no real experience) with Microsoft Dynamics when my company moved to SF. Within three days of our org going live, the powers that be decided since I helped with Dynamics, I should be a full admin in our new org. I crash our Org within THREE DAYS. We had to go to Salesforce and have them go in and reverse what I had done. Since then, I have worked directly with our admin to spot check what I was doing and ALWAYS test in a sandbox first. So I think the line is nothing goes around the Senior Admin as they are responsible for the system. I see no real issue in giving users admin abilities in Sandboxes so they can create their vision or work through items they cant verbalize and then review with the Admin team for testing and launching the changes. The Admin or Admin teams need eyes on everything that happens in the system because if something happens, it will impact business and therefore sales for the company. My slipup only impacted about 20 users since we were slowly rolling out the changes. If that were to happen today, all 500 users would be impacted and myself and perhaps my manager might lose our jobs for my slip up.

You start a new position and discover EVERYONE has System Administrator permissions.

Consultant enabled GSuite SSO in production. Set all users to SSO only. And SSO was not configured correctly. Going on 12 hours now, once your browser session expires you cannot log back into Salesforce. Keep refreshing, we’re dropping like flies and going to pen & paper backups. There are so many ways this could have been avoided. But I guess the silver lining is that at least the consultant can’t log in to break anything else now!

I had a process builder that had IsChanged and when I created the Flow it was changed to Was Set and I’m trying to determine if that condition is what caused it to fire when I Mass Transferred Records from an Inactive User to an Active User. Something fired after I did the transfer that apparently triggered the Flow and sent 8,000 Welcome emails to all Members.

I don’t wanna say some parts of Setup & Configuration are painful, but sometimes I feel like I need to have a “Safe Word” before I click on this thing…

Consultant did a Pardot implementation, didn’t explain to the client the difference between prospects, leads, and contacts, client is freaking out.

Our org has over 1900 custom objects and 4 different CPQ managed packages.

As a consultant I’ve written apex in the wrong Org.

3-4 year old Org. Client has used external consultants as Admins each on 3 month contracts, so Org had had at least 9 different Admins. Not a shred of documentation.

User complains about “not having the correct permissions” to view a few of our core custom object records, but it’s only because their “recently viewed” list was empty :joy:. Funny that they know how to toss around the word permissions but not how to search or navigate

I recently got a duplicate query parameter error that seems to be caused by a field on the object having the same api name as a field in the managed package. Shouldn’t the namespace prevent this?

Current client that has 67 Case Record Types.

118 opps that don’t have net new ARR completed because salespeople….are special…

I’ve got 3,500 contacts without accounts and they should have been added to the correct account by email domain but they didn’t.

I have an ongoing issue. Approval process started to fail because of a SF issue with else statements. I have created about 40 approval processes to replicate the original ones that started to fail. Some are failing. Some are not even though they are all based upon the same protocol.

Got some “unhandled fault” email alerts for a flow triggered by Sales reps clicking a custom action button. Started investigating why the flow was messing up, and sent a Sales-team-wide message basically saying, “hey y’all, this button is broken and I’m trying to fix it. Until it’s fixed, please don’t press the button” Shortly thereafter, my inbox was flooded with more “unhandled fault” emails triggered by the reps pressing the button

In one of the org there were 96 record types for event

15 year old Org supporting 17 business units and the first architect joined this year. Building a business case to junk it and start again.

halfway through a bottle of wine while rebuilding a flow full of unexplained tech debt…please use the description fields on things.

>Record Types are like glitter. Once you have them you can never fully get rid of them.

I think I made a boo boo. Got one of the 7 dwarves errors over the weekend. I’ve never seen an error out of Salesforce like that before.
[object Object]: system.security.NoDataFoundException: ORA-20001: ORA-06512: at “SNEEZY.SACCESS”, line 930 ORA-01403: no data found ORA-06512: at “SNEEZY.CACCESS”, line 3212 ORA-06512: at “SNEEZY.CACCESS”, line 2902 ORA-06512: at line 1 SQLException while executing plsql statement: {call cAccess.check_entity_access_proc_ncu(?,?,?,?,?,?)}(EXCLUDED, EXCLUDED, 003f4000007Ymd7, EXCLUDED, true, false) (edited)

Migrating to a new org & a team insists only initially re-creating 10 of their reports will cripple them because they have 180 they use on a regular basis. There are ‘only’ 83 that have been run this year

A client used an existing user for me temporarily (long story), simply changing the email address and now all my Trailblazer profiles are getting connected with this other user. Oy.

I was on a call today doing a knowledge transfer with another team about a client, we had talked about getting good alignment with the client SMEs, but not with the major stakeholders, one of them asked “To what percent do you think the stakeholders are aligned on this project?”
Me: “Can we use negative numbers?”

What a FANTASTIC form. Click on the country drop down which gives you an enormous list of 2 letter country codes, not all of which are in alphabetical order!!! If you select the top option “US” a new field appears above country code, and you then have to type in the state (no drop down). So valid entries are “State… or despair”. “State… of confusion”. “State of undress”.

Have to turn off 11 validation rules and 7 process builders just to do a deployment. Think we need some test class maintenance!

I shouldn’t have to dig through the response object in chrome dev tools to figure out that the scratch org is out of storage space

So deferring students in SFDC from one semester to another is kind a crappy, so I made this great Google Doc that explains how to do it step by step. Sent it out Tuesday. Today user: I can’t defer this student. Me: Follow the instructions in doc I sent you. The one that says It is strongly recommended that you keep this open when you go through this process?

Broke my flow because forgot to change get from assigned values to capturing all the fields. I have no clue how this got past not just me, but my testers…

Created a new field in a Sandbox yesterday. Didn’t show up in LEX. Cleared cookies, logged out, everything. Today, still doesn’t show up. It’s right there in Classic.

I was just reviewing an org, and it had View All Data enabled, so their site had kept working even with secure Guest Site Access enabled in Summer 20, although they hadn’t added any new sharing rules. So Winter 21 could break orgs that thought they were in the clear

Created an Org in 2010 with free Force.com licenses which is used every day and is now getting messages to say will be archived in 22 days. Salesforce Support have told me that the Org was archived in 2014!! Another example of Ghost Orgs

Most people who try to learn on their own with Trailhead find that it’s super frustrating and annoying because: Trailhead doesn’t give you any option to actually ask a question; Trailhead shows you HOW to use features, but not WHY or WHEN to use them; Trailhead doesn’t give you actual, realistic use cases or scenarios that mimic real-life; and Trailhead is super boring.

Client (a former PM) decided that my functional user stories were too much about “development” and overwhelmed the users, has written them as stuff like “User Story 1: Contacts” and put the actual user stories in as Acceptance Criteria underneath it. Me: not a scrum master- ok

Getting batch Apex error emails from an org whose last user login was in 2016.

I worked a startup that had few processes and the few they had were constantly changing. When trying to better understand the processes so I could configure Salesforce appropriately I was told that my questions were perceived as me being difficult and trying to create roadblocks.

Formula field on Account: Kim – Year 1 Discount for Match. Description says what the formula does & that it is only to be used by Kim.

I just started a new job and a new company that launched salesforce less than 6 wks ago, the partner did not do them justice and I feel like i’m a little bit drowning. I have 9 q’s, at least 12 different teams, and 0 case record types. they are all working off of 1 page layout.

That feeling when you write an Apex Helper class or a generic Lightning Web Component which is used by all other developers on the project team and you don’t even know who all are using it

Work.com !!! Confusing / incomplete installation instructions. No field descriptions. Duplicate field labels in standard objects. Incorrect data model in help documentation. Nightmare.

We’ve never defined the difference between a status or stage when tracking a sales process or engagement opportunity. I recently noticed that I’ve allowed 51 different statuses/stages for 9 (nine) different programs that need to be tracked… all within a single picklist field. Most of these 51 options are duplicative and only disenfranchise users from using the system. This is being escalated to leadership for review.

4 different Admin/Consultants spotted issues with changes disappearing
1: Has anyone noticed any changes to things like page layouts, fields missing, automations being overwritten by older versions, etc., in production, recently, with nothing in the Audit log or in the inbound change sets?
2: We are launching a new org and we KNOW we did changes and then they just disappeared! We figured it had something to do with SF pushing the new release.
3: I added the “Manage Leads” permission to a custom profile back in May according to the audit trail, yesterday a user in that profile complains that they lost the ability to manage leads, sure enough the permission was off and there was no trace of the change in the audit trail. So happy not to be alone.
4: Some recent changes in permission sets seem to have disappeared in 1 of my customer’s orgs.

A 130 line Case Assignment rule

Okay I have to know who did this 8 years ago.
Field: LOB API Name: LOB__c Picklist: A, B, C….
Field: LOB. API Name: LOB_Formula__c Formula: If(ISPICKVAL(LOB__c,’A’),’A’,IF(ISPICKVAL(LOB__c,’B’),’B’,IF(ISPICKVAL(LOB__c,’C’),’C’)…))))))))

Me: Salesforce is so customizable, it can do anything!
User: Can you change the gif on the screen loads to a picture of me?

User: I can’t find this record and I need it NOW! Salesforce is BROKEN!
Me: This record hasn’t been touched in six months
User: Yeah…
Me: When it was deleted
User: …
Me: By you
User: …

Once worked in an org that had 5 different “Event” objects and three “Task” objects

What’s a better way to handle multi-select picklists ? Not just 1, but at least 10 or more on each standard objects. They’re all custom fields. I am not sure on how to handle this situation with the client and all those fields are coming in from hubspot.

Custom Object called “Task”.

A manager who was notoriously disorganized and panicky one day submitted a change request and insisted it was urgent. It really wasn’t urgent so it was prioritized normally. She kept asking for updates daily. Finally we got around to implementing the change and rolled it out. She immediately opened a support ticket, reporting the new behavior THAT SHE HAD REQUESTED as a defect. I clocked out early and headed to the nearest bar.

Create a new email template. Create a new email alert. Email template isn’t there. Why? Because you forgot to click “available for use” on the template. Every. Single. Time.

I just took over total control last week with one week training with the old admin. When I started I asked if they kept a change log of everything that they have done. The answer was no. Now I’m running into issues of problems that had been in the org that are just coming to light.

Friday 4pm, deleted 4 ‘test’ Contacts that were linked to internal users. That promptly deleted all the related Events and declined them automatically. 100’s of calendar meeting events suddenly called out in terror and were suddenly declined.

There is a field on my Org’s Account object called Account_Name__c. It’s a formula field. The formula is: Name.

Customer has been making changes directly in production

Hard coding employee names directly into a trigger!

We had “inherited” an Org from another implementation partner and we were confused by the poor record page performance. That was until we we realized that they had used bare (no content) screenflows to trigger automations. After we had replaced those screenflows with automated flows, the performance got considerately better.

Previous admin LOVED multi-select pick lists….

Formula field on the account and the formula is Today()

User asks — if I change this record in salesforce, will yesterday’s printout be updated

I finally encountered a custom field that replicated a standard field. Our outgoing org (merging/re-implementing project in process) has First_Name__c on the Contact record. I’m sure there are more, but that’s the first one I came across. Good news…my counterpart didn’t do it & was just as flabbergasted as I.

While researching options for a backup and recovery tool, told my manager we also need to create plans for incident response and disaster recovery. He replied that I needed to convince him we need such plans. I have to build a business case for creating a disaster recovery plan in the middle of a global pandemic.

User called me an “Obstructive Bureaucrat” and threatened to come in to the office and cough on me. Why? I wouldn’t give them Admin credentials. Part of me feels like I’ve finally earned my IT Manager title.

User: I only complete X process when all Cases are closed
Me: OK, I just checked the flow error and that Case was still open per its status
User: I consider Cases that have statuses that start with ABC and have been open a long time to be closed

What to do when you have to explain how Email-to-Case works to Salesforce Support?

I’m fudging fuming… and need to vent!
For at least an hour and a half tonight I’ve been trying to get past a challenge on the LWC superbadge… I had this line in my file; import {getRecord, getFieldValue } from ‘lightning/uiRecordApi’;

And that was failing… then just out of pure frustration I tried swapping the order of the items round to this… and it now passes; import { getFieldValue, getRecord } from ‘lightning/uiRecordApi’;

This has ZERO impact on the functionality… infuriating!

If you have a mix of same-object PB updates and Flow together, your Flows won’t get re-evaluated to see the results of the PB. So, if you’re thinking of migrating, better think about doing it in one big leap (per object). And if you’ve got indirect recursion, you’ve got problems

Trying to set up a separate price book for our online store. Asked for a list of skus being sold on it and the cost… was given a list of products without skus because no one’s made skus for them yet.

Brand new user is unable to switch to Lightning, the option to do so isn’t on his screen. He says he googled it and I haven’t given him the correct permissions… Spent a half an hour looking into it on my end trying to figure out what’s wrong before going to get him to clear his cache only to find out he was using Internet Explorer.

Just discovered that we have over 1 millions lines of undocumented Apex

I just tried to set up Salesforce Google Drive integration with Files Connect and you know what? Team Drives are NOT supported! So you can only connect to personal Gmail accounts. How dumb is that?

Not for nuthin’ but the only thing “quick” about the Quick Find box in Lightning Setup is how fast it freezes when you try to type something in it.

I have a running Excel sheet for all of the Org changes that I had made – for one of the largest utility providers on the East Coast.

I recently started consulting with a small business and they have dozens of accounts bring created daily automatically and they have no reason why.

If you just heard a scream, way, way, off in the distance. That was me being asked “how much effort would it take?” to update 22 Approval Processes with 162 Steps…

I just found that a client saves date-like values in number type field and then in the same object has a formula field that turn those values into DATE

I just got a 28 page Flow error.

Record migration team doesn’t get the word out that they’re completing mass upserts on several standard objects, while another team tries to test during the same time

Partner users cannot have the View and Edit Converted Leads permission. It’s breaking all sorts of things. This is not documented ANYWHERE.

When you spend 2 hours trying to build something for your sales team, to realize they asked for the same thing 2 months ago and it’s already built

My Org has two pricebooks called “Standard Pricebook”

Refreshing your sandbox before deploying all your work into prod

Summer20- now adds a Profile “Minimum Access – Salesforce.profile'” TWICE so change sets won’t deploy unless you remove one of them. Error message is blank so not that helpful. Team wasted 2 hours this morning.

Currently, the org that I have inherited all these contacts are saved under an Account called “none”. I just ran a quick check and this account has already like 60000 contacts, causing account data skew issues.

When you waste over an hour trying to get 1 single simple line of code working in your Lightning Web Component (import communityId from ‘@salesforce/community/Id’;), and you even copied it directly from the Salesforce documentation… only to discover that this functionality is being released in Summer ’20, and you’re still 2 days away.

Had UAT scheduled and users leave it until go live before testing, and you got a thousand emails about stuff.

Finance wants Closed Lost notifications to go to the same full company distribution list as Closed Won notifications. Ummm, so hey finance, what do you want the messaging to be? “You suck, and now the whole company knows” Talk about a morale booster

When you update a bunch of lead owners and forgot about the lead owner email that goes out when it changes. GAAHHHH!

Consultants working for another department move changes to production without going through any UAT and overwrite all your page layouts

I tried to remove FinancialForce from our Org by mistake.

Inside the company there are 6 Orgs all developed by different SIs, but no consistency of DevOps processes.

One of our top reps consistently closes opportunities incorrectly knowing they are not following process, so I created a validation rule. User name = xyz, stage = closed won, message “Since you don’t follow process, contact your admin to close this deal”. Your Welcome

Myself and two of the devs got an email from our IT department once. At a company of 1500+ people he let us know that we made up 0.2% of the people and were responsible for 50% of storage on our exchange server due to flow errors that would fire off when an integration batch job ran.

Six months of deep work on org development with a client and finally reached go-live last week…. Found out this morning that the operations lead and relevant stakeholders were let go.

I just started a new a new job as a senior salesforce admin. Salesforce needs to come up with a program similar to Carfax but for Salesforce orgs. I have been completely mislead on what was actually done and it’s like unraveling a rats nest of too many process builders, a bunch of flows that don’t really work, some code, and get this there’s even an S control in here. This org was maintained by a consulting firm for the last several years. This consulting firm is all over the place at Salesforce events. Salesforce consistently highlights them, but I want to scream from the rooftops don’t hire them because of how badly they messed up this org. There is also a cluster of custom objects in this or that have a very small amount of data not exactly sure what it is but when I tried to clean it up in the sandbox it causes all of this code to error out. This consulting firm now wants my employer to pay thousands of dollars to have them help me understand what was built and they are making it seem like I’m some kind of idiot even though I have been working As a salesforce admin for almost 7 years, and I have four certifications. I’m frustrated and I’m ready to quit only 6 weeks in. I like the company but this Org is such a mess I won’t be able to actually tackle any of the projects they want me to tackle until all of this is cleaned up and I just feel like I’m dealing with the Salesforce org version of a very bad hoarders episode.

When creating custom fields and labels, NEVER abbreviate words like “Cumulative” or “Analysis”.

When you start a job and 90 minutes into your first day, sales reps starting hitting you up with feature requests bypassing Product….

Have I ever told the story of how I committed to build a custom component for a company and forgot to check they weren’t on Professional edition? Ahhh, good times…

Switching from Connect Leader to Groove on a Professional Platform. Turns out CL managed package installed 4 Custom Objects and about 20 Custom Fields. Did it log calls as tasks? Nope! CL Call Logs! Now I don’t have any custom field space unless I uninstall… but do i re-create all that activity???

User created a new report folder to provide a vendor with api access to a single report, but when I tried to set the sharing permissions on that folder, it already had a bizarro collection of sharing permissions. I couldn’t change any of them. So I logged on as the user, discover that he’s using lightning, and this time see a message stating that the folder is inheriting permissions from a parent folder. And I’m like, parent report folder? What identifies this as a subfolder? How do I figure out what the parent folder is? How do I navigate through the top level folders looking for child folders? It appears as a top level folder in Classic with no indication that it’s a subfolder. In Lightning subfolders don’t appear unless I click on the correct top level folder and then scroll to the bottom of the list of reports there. How do I know which top level folders contain subfolders? Answer to all of the above: No clue. No way I could find in the GUI or online. I finally ended up deleting the subfolder that appeared as a top level folder in Classic and just created a new REAL top level folder, also in Classic. Problem solved (just shoot me now).

Spent the day figuring out why user isn’t receiving work from Omni-Channel. When logging in as user, receiving work normally. Finally found that there were two users with near identical names – one correctly set up that I was using, and one with the user’s real name.

I cannot / don’t want to migrate to Lightning because 1: It’s slow as a snail.
2: Irony is that first you have to refresh the entire page to re-render the refreshless features of #lightning on an idle page but with an active session. This doesn’t make me forget #Classic

I think I just set a new world record for longest Flow error email. A single email containing hundreds if not thousands of failed record after running a scheduled Flow. Was trying to create Campaign Members from it (we’re on PE), but got a whopping record locking error. Gmail is still loading the email after about 5 minutes of me scrolling through it.
Final Result:
Pages: 2,752
Words: 1,435,809
Characters (no spaces): 8,274,096
Characters (with spaces): 9,668,304
Paragraphs: 1,601
Lines: 108,704
*Statistics begrudgingly provided by Microsoft Word.
Lesson learned. Don’t use Scheduled Flows to get around Record Locking errors or small batch sizes. It seems that Scheduled Flows execute with batches of one.

Each request to make a field required or default breaks multiple test classes. On the upside, I’m getting really good at fixing failed test classes.

4 industries on Account, and 6 on Opp. 2 on the Opp are account fields, but set differently than account

When the new ‘vision’ leader for the Salesforce business side asks for access to download a Trailhead package into PRODUCTION so they can complete a badge!

Installed package setting doesn’t save properly and creates 55 pages of inactive picklist values that apparently would need to be deleted individually

Was on a call with a consulting company and he was talking about some great new lightning features. It was like he was trying to hurt me intentionally. Knife right into the heart. Just sitting here in my classic corner, sobbing.

Shared a QA sandbox with a different firm and they make breaking changes to that org because they don’t bother to run test code when they deploy to it…. and now we’re blocked from deploying.

Lightning is anything but its name

Process builder ruins my day. It throws so many cpu timeouts

We have Account pages taking up a long time (in mins) to load.

We had multiple users with admin permissions until 3 months ago. There is a lot of unnecessary fields, one off automation etc. No real consistent flow.

Need to do major overhaul of page layouts, transitioning JS buttons, etc so that the pages load this century.

Client asked if they need computers to access Salesforce.

User asked me for the URL for Salesforce.com

I’m trying to log in and create a case for a client, if I login with the production credentials I was given for their org, it doesn’t find a profile, if I login with my trailblazer profile it says no orgs are connected and takes me to an Org Picker page that doesn’t have any options. What am I supposed to do to open a case?

In the new Work.com Employee object there are 2 fields with label=EmployeeID. One for the employee and one is for the employee’s manager. And not a single field in any of the new objects has a description.

Client wants to create a custom Global Picklist for use on Lead/Acct/Contact/Opp/Campaign that would replace the OOTB Lead Source field and the OOTB Campaign Type field. My brain is like, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Bug #1463112 “Cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm” : Bugs : Unity
14.04, locked screen to go to lunch, upon return from lunch cat was sitting on keyboard, login screen was frozen & unresponsive. To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard. Resolution: Switched to virtual terminal, restarted lightdm, lost all open windows in X session. What should have happened: lightdm not becoming unresponsive.

Recently ran into an issue where a managed package contained a custom field with a Field Name identical to a custom field that we already had. The managed package was not running properly and it took longer than I’d care to admit to figure out why. Is there a reason why no error was flagged from creating a “duplicate” field name, or why the package download didn’t just fail?

6 different fields capturing CRM integration info, 5 of them on the same object, all picklists with the same list of values. Oh, and most of them are required fields.

I was an admin for at least 7 years before I realized it was “Unfiled Public Reports”, and not “Unified Public Reports”. I still think the Unification of them sounds better.

“We know you’re a Salesforce expert we hired so we can do things differently but the team has decided that we want to ignore your recommendation and do it pretty much the same way, so that’s that.”

My Salesperson who thinks changing Account Names to a “.” to mark it for deletion is at it again….I’m waiting for the email telling me he can’t get into the system. I love the freeze button.

Task.Type and Task.TaskSubType are two different fields. Task.Type is human editable and is the one your users know and love. Task.TaskSubType is what determines the icon that shows in the Activity History

System is down – we hit a Salesforce DB limit they throttled us to 5% speed or something we can’t even deploy a fix for our bad code – I am on the 10th floor troubleshooting and trying to work out what is going on. 13th floor has the marketing team in a meeting with our CMO and the Salesforce sales team pitching marketing cloud as hard as they can. AE comes down to check on us – because I have sent him 10 million emails and says: “I think you guys should consider purchasing Salesforce Shield it may have helped you have better logs in this type of issue”

Having to actively avoid using the new Help Trailblazer.Me log in when needing to open a case for a client.

Took on a customer with an Org that had countless custom objects, and Activity History enabled on all objects with the number of tracked fields maxed out on all of them. They also had a huge web of processes, flows, triggers, and updates. The Activity History object was nearly full, and running reports or dashboards on Activities was super slow. Their solution was to write a trigger to delete any new Activity History records. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

The idea that we’re using Word, Excel, PDF and other tools to document is beyond absurd considering the breadth of the implementation.

We had a master-detail object to Accounts, and recently converted it to lookup. Turns out that doing that will blow away some report type. Now we have at least a hundred user reports that no longer load, since the report type doesn’t exist. Oops.

“Does anyone have any info on the incident taking place affecting visualforce pages? I am trying to avoid calling Salesforce support!”

Someone renamed the root asset library in files and thinks it belongs to only them now.

Getting pulled into 15 different directions. Service, chat, chatbots, new communities, knowledge, reports, marketing cloud, new data extensions, troubleshooting non technical error from users who didn’t pay attention during training. Regular users asking for admin rights when they have no idea and think I just turn things on…..

Field “Primary Address” has API name “MailingAddress”. Field “Mailing Address” has API name “OtherAddress”

Switched on the Adoption Assistant and the “Why are you switching to Classic” function over the weekend. My first 3 responses this morning…I can’t stand Lightning, I prefer Classic, and Classic is better.

You get a company-wide email from a rep about the deals in the pipeline for this new product the company launched & you respond asking him if an actual product was ever created in Salesforce or if he’s still working on spreadsheets and you get the response:
‘All spreadsheets, and will stay as such for time being. The crazy possessiveness is fear…we cannot let just anyone quote this and doing the quote is a moving target!”

We want 68 cross object formula fields. Don’t need to add them to the page layout – we need them only in the list views. 68 separate new fields on obj C that replicate values through lookup fields to obj A & obj B.

Vendor not on AppExchange integrates with Salesforce via OAUTH and then just adds metadata with no documentation. Oh look, new field on Opportunity and Campaign. Oh look, a new object. Did I mention there’s no sandbox option (tested in a dev org)? And that their support says “When in doubt, please use a Systems Administrator-level user to connect.”

My “favorite” user in a report to management: The Salesforce is terrible. It’s too clunky and doesn’t help me at all. The Admin is useless and wasting everyone’s time and money…etc. etc.. Management: Calls panicked meeting to discuss pulling the plug on the whole Salesforce investment and to yell at me (the Admin). Me: Very suspicious of favorite user’s motives. Checks login history (imagine an immediate evil smile). At meeting: Favorite user is going on at great length about how terrible Salesforce is and how there is nothing wrong with their post-it-note methodology blah blah blah. Me in the meeting: Finally, asked by management to explain my failures as an Admin to make everyone happy. I asked if I could present and went straight to setup>users>my favorite user. Then asked them if they were aware that Salesforce records login history… Moral of the story: If you’re a Sales Manager that hates change and technology, don’t try to avoid learning how to use Salesforce by trash talking the platform and the poor Admin just trying to get you setup. And definitely don’t base your trash talk on having “tested” the system when Salesforce automatically records that YOU NEVER EVEN LOGGED IN OR SETUP A PASSWORD!!!!

Just talked an ecosystem high profile client. Undocumented 12 yr old Org. They want to implement CPQ. GSI(1) recommended “start again with a new Org”. They get second opinion from GSI(2) – same answer – “Nuke It”. GSI(2) wins the work to rebuild, but this time with documentation.

Classes with API version 20 – over 20 versions behind the most recent one. Cannot be upgraded due to unit tests inside them, and possibly other such hacks. No one bothers with refactor.

When you’re doing additional testing in your next sandbox & keep getting errors on your screenflow because the previous admin made a handful of fields required at the field vs. page level & you’re not using that page layout & forgot to add those fields to your changeset.

Multi-org environment: Overall architect creates stories for all teams to install some new package required by Security Team, says there is no affect. I start seeing CPU Limit expectations, so created a new dev org, removed duplicate rules, and created 10k Accounts via Execute Anonymous = Success. Deleted accounts, emptied recycle bin, installed security package. Insert 10k accounts = CPU_TIME_LIMIT, Insert 5k accounts = CPU_TIME_LIMIT

3 exact same field types on one object:
Agent or Direct
Agent or Direct?
Is an Agent or Direct

Trying to create a report grouped by a custom ‘Status’ field and being presented with almost 50 variations of a status, Only to find out that said Status field is not a picklist, but a text field.

No UAT before pushing to production and then getting rapid fire request when ‘bugs’ are found

Because support finally figured out how to fix the issue where every time a sandbox refreshed, I had to login and immediately reset my password (no one else on the team, just me). For a number of months it didn’t take, so every login I had to reset. 2-4 environments refreshed every 2 weeks for the past 20-some months = so many password resets

Yes, we have Lightning. We login to it at first, but immediately switch over to Classic. We just find it too difficult, slow and clunky.

When an end user messes with your dashboard reports that are in a specifically labeled Dashboard reports folder. And are titled Do Not Modify.

A thing my customer just said: “We can do anything with Salesforce except for that we don’t have our actual data in the system”

Just joined a new company as a Salesforce Admin. They use picklist fields with users’ first and last names where lookup fields should be used and custom number fields for currency.

People who take Salesforce docs and turn it into a blog should be shot

New Lead/Contact field request: Marital Status and # of Kids…

The integration team moves to a new middleware platform with 12 hours notice and no QA signoff from the team but management decides it’s worth the risk because of another team.

And now with my boss leaving, our Salesforce Steering Committee thinks it’s a good idea to have the whole team unanimously approve EVERY request that comes in for a change. There are 11 people on the Steering Committee, including the CEO, so the CEO has to approve a picklist value addition.

#Appexchange Consulting page is broken, there are Gold partners showing up under Platinum, Silver and Platinum partners showing up under Gold, etc. Are the #AppExchange Listing tiers wrong or the page grouping listings into the wrong groups? I think all of us partners would gladly provide free QA services to the AppExchange team if they asked.

A senior consultant
1) created field in Account: “Modified Date and Time”
2) set history tracking on this field
3) set up a workflow rule (ISCHANGED) to carry out Field Update
With this _recursive_ process, after 3 months we have a 9Gb history file! The project mgr (w lots of certifications) and the consultant did not believe me — despite the evidence of a 9Gb file!

A client called me to implement some new requirement in their org as the previous internal Admin left the company. I found that 28 of the 30 active users were set as System Administrators… When I highlighted this to my customer, he told me that a dozen of them were not part of the company anymore! First workshop was around Profiles and Security 🙂

10 admins. Over 1,000 integration failure cases. 1 clerk performing a gap analysis on data solves the issue in a mass update, instead of trying to solve the case.

When I first started I wanted to have different record layouts based on the stage of an Opportunity. So I used Record Type for each stage.

We have an Org where the consultants had added custom objects and fields which typos as English was not their 1st (or 2nd) language. They are everywhere so we cannot change them.

I inherited an Org. The Opportunity object had been renamed to Project. And then someone had added a new custom object called Opportunity.

I had a horrible boss. I was the Admin and she dragged me along to a trade show. She wanted a file of leads uploaded to our Org. I normally want to check and recheck. She told me I only had 15 mins. I uploaded the CSV file and missed a column. Every contact name was replaced with a date. It took me 2.5 hours to fix it.

New job with a new company. The Salesforce instance is in shambles. Tests failing in production, copy+paste classes put in by a sales director, etc. Absolutely MUST deploy a piece of code by EOW, but code coverage is at 62%. Just deployed a fake class with 1001 lines that do absolutely nothing with a companion test class that tests to make sure that class does absolutely nothing. Brought coverage up to 77%.

Initial analysis for a client of their Org now takes 3 days NOT 2 weeks by using Elements.cloud which saves $8,400 in consulting fees.

I had an org that took a bit of work to get Dreamhouse MP out of last year because someone used the fields!!!

Deleted a softphone layout. Now most of the setup pages are broken.

Hard-coded start and end date variables in test classes, causing tests to fail on code deployments during most of the year.

For a week scratching my head why the standard CPQ contracting process isn’t working in one of the communal sandboxes….then realized the client turned off CPQ triggers

Found a checkbox under the section of the page layout called ‘Correspondence Opt Outs,’ so TRUE means the Account doesn’t receive the mailings and FALSE means that they do, but that isn’t indicated anywhere in the label or API name for reporting or data pulls.

I just joined a new company who has never had anyone with any real Salesforce experience. There are 56 profiles and 50 roles for 184 users.

Quick Create is on my short list of things I turn off immediately in a new org. Its a great way to create orphaned contacts. I once had an org with over 100k contacts with no accounts. Many of them the same name

we recently had some really annoyed users whose dashboard reports were all of a sudden inaccessible after we had removed a field. What we were not aware of was that historically when the field was created (lookup field) the system automatically had created a record type which was automatically made available standard out of the box with no knowledge of ours that this has happened. When the field, which we had created was retired and removed from view it automatically removed the record type and therefore all existing reports which were built using this record type. As the field in particular which we removed was not used we were not aware that this record type was there and this record type as created by salesforce was not shown on the where is it used list.

A new customer came on board. On first inspection of their org, we found that they had created a custom object and named it Cases__c. When we asked why they did this, they told us that Case is singular, and that they will have more than one Case per customer, so they clearly had to create Cases__c. Duh, I guess.

“We need a new Salesforce Org.”
“Why?”
“We ran out of licenses”

Working with a bunch of API names that are NOTHING LIKE the corresponding field labels and are so far from being actual words or logical abbreviations that you have to copy/paste them each time to get them right…

Or the reverse where you have a bunch of fields with exactly the same labels (I’m looking at you, “ZIP Code,” “Business Phone,” and “Mobile Phone”) and different API names.

Scrolling through Account fields: PhoneNumber1_c, PhoneNumber2_c,…. PhoneNumber10__c

Last Monday (April 06th) night, I found a prospect where his custom object has 762 fields, 2500 record types, and 1500 page layouts. I am staying in quarantine for the next couple of years.

Trying to make a change to one field that gets set through a process builder… come to find out, there’s one process builder that then each node invokes another process builder (total of 8 on the opportunity object). One of the invocable process builders just updates the opportunity name. A little excessive to do a whole invocable PB for one small update, but alright… The next node invokes the next PB that has one node – ‘no conditions! just execute the actions’ and the action is labeled ‘nothing’ and literally does nothing. Been at this 2 hours trying to document what all this is doing – still haven’t found where the one thing is that I need to update.

Oh look, the consultant created ANOTHER custom field with the exact same name and data type as a standard field on the same object.

Oh look, the consultant created ANOTHER custom field with the exact same name and data type as a standard field on the same object.

467 page layouts & 467 record types for a custom object

When your boss is let go who set up the entire org, its automation, and cpq

When you’re trying to figure out why a standard field isn’t on a page then realize its a visualforce page that looks EXACTLY like the standard page layout.

We have a formula field that looks like minified JavaScript.

Just in: Request to rename the Opportunity “Type” field to “Opportunity Type”

Recent exchange with manager
Me: it’s not working because someone turned off the code in the integration system in the last two days.
A manager : that code was NEVER turned on since the time the product went live, but clients were still able to place orders just fine. The codes are not magically changing from one day to another.
Me emailing another colleague; can you check the logs of the field on the integration system to see if the code was ever turned on?
Colleague : yes it was on when the product went live. It was accidentally turned off and I know exactly when.
Me forwarding email to ‘the manager’ : Magic!!

Client has just informed me that they no longer have an immediate need for an integration and will revisit at a later date, three days after I’ve finished the integration.

A flow is broken because someone changed some restricted picklist options.

Client is going to do testing in about 30 minutes, and they off-handedly mention that they want me to automate 11 email templates real quickly. “Should take like ten minutes”.

Your users are getting validation errors when sorting quote line items, but nothing looks like it should be hitting the validation rule. You investigate further, only to find out your previous product manager was changing a custom price field (which your validation field was referencing) and not the Pricebook entry, thereby causing the error. Now, you have to do a pull of all your PBEs to make sure they match the custom price field

When you ask a customer about the 2000 historic Leads nobody has touched. ‘Our Leads are complex it can take 2 years to close’. Then you explain about ‘Lead Lost’ status.

“Can you create a picklist of our (thousands of) accounts for the primary affiliation field so we don’t have to do any typing?”

Audit an Orgs data security model and found a permission set assigned to 1/4 of users called “Edit List Views”. Edit List Views has Modify All Data and Manage Users enabled.

I just uncovered a Process with 84 versions. And they don’t even have one process per object.

Because the forecast tab doesn’t use dated exchange rates and I have to keep explaining why there’s a difference between what is in the forecast and what is actually displayed on the opportunity.

Because the project I got pulled into two days ago had at least a month of meetings in preparation and today someone jumped on the call and said the whole project won’t work and they are going in a different direction. The silence that followed was enough, but the debate afterwards as to why they weren’t told was also worth it.

Working with a bunch of API names that are NOTHING LIKE the corresponding field labels and are so far from being actual words or logical abbreviations that you have to copy/paste them each time to get them right…

At a previous company all tables were actually just unique #s and you had to look up somewhere else to get table name. i.e. something like TBL1121021 was Accounts and TBL2423432 was Contacts (This wasn’t in SF at least)

User: Why wasn’t this email sent to this Contact?
Me: *pulls email logs, checks records* There’s no email address entered for this Contact. There has to be an email address or the system doesn’t know where to send the email.
User: Thank you for the clarification.

A client Org has everyone set up as System Admin. Additionally, there is a generic username license that someone used to log in and delete records and export data. I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding….

We had two resources spend one week to create a process build driven by two fields which have never been filled out.

PUBLIC SERVICE Announcement! If you make your mtg links PUBLIC you run the risk of some horrible sick person joining and flooding your viewers with disgusting images!! This JUST happened during our Ohana Wine catch-up! We had to end the mtg because we got infiltrated.

We discovered by using Elements that we have custom fields on Leads that are used in Apex Classes, reports and dashboards. And we don’t even use Leads. We ONLY use Accounts.>

We have over 170 custom apps. Our work seems to be work through them and deprecate the ones we aren’t using, and then 3 months later build them again as a new set of requirements pop back up.

Did you know that Salesforce will not stop you from creating an apex class called Test that then goes on to break any code that has Test.isRunningTest() in it? Also having a variable named “json” breaks all sorts of stuff. It took us forever to figure out what the problem was!

Please enter Twitter handle: enters new and old URLS
Please enter contact e-mail: enters main and backup e-mail addresses
Please enter contact phone number: enters explanation of why the contact phone number hasn’t been entered

When cleaning up the 1500 account dupes with a third party dedupe tool. And your manager says “well, just in case, export the list and dedupe in Excel afterwards”. What?!?!?

Local IP addresses (192.168….) whitelisted on profiles.

Had a user add not 1, not 2, but 106 contacts manually after I explicitly said to send me their list of contacts soI can format and load them in the system. Said it took him the entire day. Needless to say, all his entries were incorrect and were promptly deleted.

When you’re updating advanced criteria for a managed package, testing, and the thing doesn’t work after an hour and a half, then you realize you’ve been updating the description of the condition instead of the actual condition criteria…

I once shared administration duties with another person who couldn’t be bothered to learn the first thing about how to administer Salesforce, merely taking the shortest path to get any task done. For example, instead of learning how folder sharing works, she made all users System Administrators so that they could see all of the reports. I put a stop to this by creating a Validation Rule to throw an error any time she attempted to make someone a System Administrator. I made the error message something nonsensical like “Illegal action on system.create(User): Error code 0X776yuZw8bXx22. This action is not permitted in the current application state.” Then when she kept asking me if I knew anything about this, I just played dumb.

Discussion on forum over the course of a day involving 3 people (names changed to protect identities).

Mary :I am experiencing a frustrating issue with updating custom fields via Data Loader. Here’s my case… we need to update 35,000 contact record’s custom address fields. Yes, 35,000. When i try to use Data Loader’s “Update” function, it hits an Apex CPU time out error. So far, i have disabled all Contact record-related processes, which did not work, and also tried batch sizes of as low as 50 records for an update – still no luck. Can someone suggest some further adjustments? Thank you!

Pete: Have you tried dropping it down to 20?

Mary: Only down to 50. My fear is that if we need to do 20 at a time, with 35,000 total, it’ll take days….

Robert: Is the field you are trying to update tied to any automation? Is there any automation based on Edit on Contacts?

Pete: You must have a ton of automation on contact. You’ll need to look at triggers and process builder and see if you can improve anything.

Rob: Might not be on that contact itself, but automation somewhere that is referencing that field.

Mary: There is, but I’ve de-activated those processes and the error continues…

Rob: Triggers?

Mary: I have not set any triggers up…

Pete: Or maybe rollup fields from contact to account that is then causing automation to run there?

Rob: Did you check the Where Is This Used on the field? Just to make sure there isnt any automation elsewhere

Rob: Do you have any managed packages?

Mary: Yes

Mary: We have one rollup field

Mary: Checking now…

Mary: We did have one workflow that i wasn’t aware of. Would that be enough to cause preventing them?

Rob: You should check in Object Manager to see if there are any triggers on Contact. One or more of the managed packages might have installed one.

Mary: There is one from a managed package that checks duplicates. Should this be disabled?

Rob: I guess depending on what the workflow rules criteria is and what the action is as well.

Pete: It is so hard to say what could be the culprit without a lot of trial and error and poring through debug logs. Your rollup could be causing automation on the account to fire. The workflow could be doing a field update that causes other automation to run. The managed package could be causing the problem. It could be a combination of all of them.

Mary: It WAS the trigger from a managed package! WOOHOO!

I once shared administration duties with another person who couldn’t be bothered to learn the first thing about how to administer Salesforce, merely taking the shortest path to get any task done. For example, instead of learning how folder sharing works, she made all users System Administrators so that they could see all of the reports. I put a stop to this by creating a Validation Rule to throw an error any time she attempted to make someone a System Administrator. I made the error message something nonsensical like “Illegal action on system.create(User): Error code 0X776yuZw8bXx22. This action is not permitted in the current application state.” Then when she kept asking me if I knew anything about this, I just played dumb.

I need to do some Permission Set clean-up (and put into Groups), but there are a number of them I didn’t create & of course there’s no documentation on it so I don’t know what’s in a lot of them.

First day on a new project for a new customer, I notice that they have a custom object called Cases__c. Ugh. We tried to push them towards fixing that but they wouldn’t budge.

1200 lead to contact dupes. And leadership thinks it is ok and won’t be a problem…….

I ran data loader and instead of inserting the 500 records from the XLS it inserted 50,000 records and blow up my Dev Org. The only option was to create a new Org and spend days recreating the customizations and data.

I created a new Opportunity field in a sandbox, promoted it to production, then used Data Loader to update the field. Unbeknownst to me another admin had created a badly defined Opportunity Workflow directly in Prod. The Workflow fired every time an Opportunity was edited, and if the Opportunity Name was null, it closed the Opportunity as Lost. I have no idea what this was supposed to accomplish. But the end result was a whole bunch of incorrect email notifications going out about lost Opportunities. I spent days cleaning that up.

My first admin job years and years ago – Lotus Notes was the system of record because SF had dates that were 4-5 years past due on opps. 154 admins, out of date opps, and maxed out fields.

I have at least 5 for all the BU / Industry fields…one for each ‘data type’……you know…..just in case. I deleted 4 and moved the “data” if you could call it that to the standard Industry field.

People hated that I took Admin away first. Their biggest fear was what if we don’t have the fields we need? They just could’t just add fields.

5 Industry Fields on Account, 3 were text.

My first admin role was for < 20 users and excel was the SSOT because their "vp of sales" could flub the #'s .Once I got Salesforce humming and could report on opportunities after a cleanup, they quickly saw how lazy he was and NOT selling anything just collecting a paycheck, but he was one of the "good old boys", so instead they alienated me until I quit because i exposed flaws in their processes.

I’m forced to do a full system review right now and cleanup. We’ve been through 4 partners since I started and are getting a new one soon. We’ve got a hot mess for our system, and little to no documentation. Needless to say I need to pretty things up for them and clean it all up.

Every app I’ve tried to purchase has gone through at least six months of legal negotiation to agree on terms and conditions.

So after a great deal of troubleshooting we just realized that a managed package in our sandbox is somehow saving record data and metadata to and from our production org instead of the sandbox where it is installed…. :astonished:

Sales Cloud Einstein is predicting we’ll close the quarter with less revenue than we’ve actually closed to date. We re-established forecast settings first week in February so I’m wondering if that messed with the data. Went from monthly to quarterly forecast periods.

The assign user list has gotten a bit chunky and can take a little while to scan through all the names, has some dead or inactive users that could be removed (my personal favorite being “not used not used”)

Field created in 2012. No workflows, not on any page layouts, referenced in 20 reports. 6 million records, all blank. Referenced in a SOQL query in one class but never used or evaluated. Just queried for, and summarily ignored.

When you bang your head against a wall for a week to determine why a client isn’t getting Lead Assignment emails only to find out they had filtered all emails from Salesforce to a folder they forgot about.

User went straight to HR to gain access to “Add himself” to all the Opportunities he’s worked on…. HR came to my boss, copying me, and asked if we could give him access. My boss being way more PC than I would have been, said that it could cause issues “hypothetically” speaking if we just let him do that without the Opp Owner involved. “Not that he would ever” add himself to an Opp he didn’t belong on…

54,146 Email Templates. 114 MILLION tasks. 18 MILLION cases. 1.4x storage limit.

You check on a functionality requirement before the development has started and it wasn’t required. And then the demo with the client happens and suddenly it’s required.

Overseas developer turned off all of our process builders without notifying anyone. You can imagine the chaos that caused!

1.5 MILLION reports and 1.5 MILLION metadata items.

Moving too fast. Sandboxes not refreshed so out of sync. Development straight in production. Fields deleted by mistake. No documentation. No formal processes.

Company has an OBJECT called “Contact Nick Names” (yes, spelled just like that) to track people’s nicknames.

We discovered that Sales Reps were deleting Closed Opportunities to increase their % win rate.

Field deleted without checking with Analytics. And therefore Snapshots and Reporting failed. Lots of time spent remedying.

Needed some work done on a contact object for the product mgt team. Our Salesforce Product Owner was busy with a lot of projects for the Sales team. I mapped out my process, which helped to flesh out the requirement and specific needs. Our Business Analyst did not have to spend hours thinking about this, managed to implement this and update our processes in one morning because everything was understood.

Zen #22

I’m so grateful to be in an org that appreciates security and how it works properly unlike my first org that learn what open sharing is from a customer overseas! 🙂

Zen #21

1200+ Salesforce users. 100% logins. If it is is not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist

Zen #20

Our Group Sales & Reservations Team Managers worked with me to create a sales process in Sales Cloud to replace something like 15 spreadsheets and numerous post-its

Cassady Ludvigsen – National Ability Center

Zen #19

Got a great Project Manager – game changer!!!!

Zen #18

Consolidated the available report types down to 12 for the entire Org to support any report request

Evan Ponter – Lanvale Consulting

Zen #17

Built a dynamic Einstein security models so that one dashboard and one model could serve one company from CGO to clients

Lucas Ribeiro – riverBI

Confession #763

Remapped Contracts because of poorly tested requirements in a stale sandbox.

Confession #762

We use Apex triggers because no-one knew about field dependencies. Also we created custom objects because no-one knew about record types.

Confession #761

CIO Said “any monkey can do this.” Removed experienced, certified Admin with low-cost inexperienced outsider. They created such a mess in the Org that it had to be shut down and a new Org spun up.

Confession #760

The Org has 12 Products and 38 Opportunity record types.

Confession #759

I accidentally “admitted” 1300 students to our university. Luckily the head of admissions noticed and only a few had “enrolled”.

Confession #758

Filling fields using Flow rather than formula fields.

Confession #757

Users are getting errors when trying to save a PDF to a quote. It’s a couple users & they’ve tried different templates. Last night I rolled out a Quote Record type, but the quote with the problem is on the new record type. I’m just now realizing we have the ‘Notes & Attachments’ related list on the quote. It’s not ideal, but I updated the approval process to unlock the record after it’s approved.

Confession #756

I inherited an org which had data from 2 acquisitions in less than a year dumped into the system with ZERO efforts to dedupe, and loads of “legacy XYZ field” fields from both orgs. It’s been 2 years, and I’m still finding things to clean up from these.

Confession #755

We’re agile, but disorganized agile. We have a sync every minute from other db. No documentation of mapping so no-one knows the implications of making changes.

Confession #754

My CEO called my cell telling me an entire program wasn’t showing up on any of his reports. The department manager had deleted that program record. I spent the entire night increasing security access and recreating data.

Confession #753

Anyone have any examples of dashboard’s they’ve created to track their business? I’m specifically interested in anything related to Salesforce/Pardot campaigns performance. We’re planning on trying to create something in Excel/Google Sheets because we find Salesforce’s capabilities to be lacking.

Have you looked at any of the free Salesforce Lab Dashboard packages on the appexchange? I’ve used some of them as a baseline, then tweaked per our business.

I have never been to the AppExchange before. I will look. Thanks.

Confession #752

Discovered a small org where an untrained person was serving as their admin. When new users joined, the admin just overwrote an inactive user account with the new person’s details because it was easier than creating a new one from scratch. Now you have a new user with years of history and out of context Chatter history…

Zen #16

My CFO said to me “I hate Lightning!” right after we made the switch. Why? Because he couldn’t find the one report folder he uses. I “favorited” it for him, and now he’s happy in Lightning.

Zen #15

I have filled 100% of my Custom Object descriptions – that’s over 110 Custom Objects documented.

Confession #751

Spent 3 hours putting a change of process in live after weeks of designing and testing to needs of the requester to resolve an audit issue. By the end of the day, had to turn the new process off again as whole sales team up in arms about the process that they hadn’t been consulted on.

Confession #750

Support agent I’ve been working with for weeks on a Lightning Out issue reveals they don’t know what an OAuth token is by calling it “some kind of reusable token” and asking to instead provide an “API Session ID”.

Confession #749

User emails for a password reset because they can’t login to the sandbox using the production ID even though they’ve been emailed multiple times to append the sandbox name to their ID.

Confession #748

I couldn’t keep from laughing upon hearing that a client wants to rip out their integration for importing Dated Currency Exchange Rates and instead have the numbers emailed to them from the bank and upload those, because the integration costs too much.
I still don’t know how they think they’re going to get the rates into Salesforce. Maybe using that “enable magic” checkbox?

Confession #741

Found a process builder that was here well before my time that had criteria Formula evaluates to true and the formula was 1=1… I guess No criteria would have been too easy.

Confession #747

Expired all passwords without notifying users.

Confession #746

How many times do I have to tell Salesforce Support and our AE that we do not want to use Premier again? Premier Admin Assist messed up an import so bad that it took 5 of us over 2 years to clean it up.

Confession #745

I’ve worked with a team to build out Service Cloud for their use successfully. One component of the team has asked for a many-to-many relationship between Cases and a custom object. This team did not like using the junction object and instead asked for fields on the Case details only eliminating the custom object and junction object. Now… they are asking how they can add many to many relationships for the same content. Luckily I only hid the custom objects knowing that we would come full circle.

Confession #744

I worked as a Solution Architect/BA on a transformation project. I was not given access to the any of the tools to do my job (Jira…) by an offshore SI. I had to knowledge transfer and suffered for 4 months until I quit. They went pseudo live 2 yrs later with less than limited capability..

Confession #743

I was called by a Salesforce customer via a friend that knows the CEO. Their implementation was done at high cost. When I logged into the Org I saw that much of the work was done by an offshore user. One one object they created 5 Record Types. But all 5 were assigned to the same Page Layout, and none of the picklists were customized.

Confession #742

Interviewed with a company considering implementing salesforce but the guy leading the effort decides to want to build a Home Grow CRM. Asks me if I want to be part of this effort. No, I’ll pass and good luck with that. There is a reason why nearly all of the Fortune 500 use SF. Hello!!!

Confession #740

I can’t get a lighting readiness report to run now in Spring 20 for a client. I guess the objects don’t want to be touched 🙂

Confession #739

A user (who unbeknownst to me) had “view set up and configuration” permissions, sees the prompt about updating record page settings, follows the prompt instructions and inadvertently makes the activity component on every lighting record page disappear. Then when I set it back it changed the assigned custom lightning record page to a new default one for every record page I had created. Meaning I had to spend my day fixing every object that I had made custom lighting record pages and switching them back. Constant emails of “hey I can’t see this” “the layout is different in cases” all….day….long. Promptly removed “view set up and configuration” from said user.

Confession #738

Clients learning to create fields have marked EVERY **** FIELD required instead of on the layout

Confession #737

We have 154 customers with 300+ sites and salesforce has just changed the fundamental security model for sites. #whyadminsdrink

Confession #736

I did a mass update of email addresses on contacts in the “sandbox”, to a few internal addresses, so during UAT, the users could simulate and test our real processes. I was worried they would actually send to one of our contacts…well, SOMEHOW, I managed to do the update in production…

Confession #735

Client describes a CPQ product as what they want but balks at actually purchasing CPQ; wants a “roll-your-own” CPQ

Confession #734

How about creating multiple custom objects…WITH THE SAME NAME! Like a custom object called Contacts or Reports or Accounts. ….I’m going to slowly step away from my electronic devices now and get me some Tums. I’m having some serious PTSD right now

Confession #733

Oh look, the consultant created ANOTHER custom field with the exact same name and data type as a standard field on the same object.

Confession #732

Consultant set everything in a new org as a custom build, all custom objects, custom pages using apex code. No declarative features. No workflows. No process builder. No roles. All users setup as system admins. No sprints. No training. No documentation. No surprise… it doesn’t work.

Confession #731

Org reached its hourly limit for processing workflow time triggers. Processing will resume in the next hour. I am trying to run Email alerts on more than 20,000 Leads.

Confession #730

Deployment for Community pages simply leaves out 1 page, which cannot be selected separately in a change set.

Confession #729

Just ran all tests in a client org. Over 800 Apex Test failures, probably half of them due to issues with State and Country Picklists. Assertions failed, SOQL 101s, Mixed DML errors, Null Pointer Exceptions, etc. Probably no one will care, though.

Confession #728

We have page layouts named after people who no longer work for the company

Confession #727

We have 9M characters of Apex code. I KNOW there is stuff in here that is not called anymore, aside from the stuff that could be optimized.

Confession #726

4 of us on 1 hour long call chasing through why Mailchimp integration doesn’t work. Turns out it doesn’t actually sync fields greater than 80ch even though you can add it to the sync mapping. e.g LongTextArea fields. Doh!! The only way to check was to add dummy fields directly into production.

Confession #725

We had 83 installed unlocked packages in production. Nightmare to manage. we also experienced a sudden slowdown in installation times for no apparent reason; some of our packages were lasting 1:30h to build & install

Confession #724

Inherited an org with no documentation that has a duplicate of the Lead object called Lead__c no one can tell me why we have it, everything is the exact same but I’m not allowed to delete it either….the real kicker…we don’t even use leads, just accounts and contacts!

Confession #723

Was asked to back up a custom object before a major change set, turns out 90% of the 2000 fields were hidden from admins so would not show up in the backup!

Confession #722

On the account object we have a custom field that holds the ID of the record (and no, it’s not the 18 digit case safe one, that also held in a field of its own too!)

Confession #721

I found out recently I wasn’t the only one in the office with a pencil sharpener.

Confession #720

We had an app that managed hotel rooms. A manager needed a report showing the rooms they had on one side of a hall – the odd numbered rooms. Someone created a checkbox field with the name “Is_Odd” which was true for rooms with odd numbers. They didn’t bother with a description of the field. Later, a manager asked me, “What criteria makes a room odd?”

Confession #719

You’re using an e-sign app and they let their SSL certificate expire so couldn’t sign paperwork for almost a full day.

Confession #718

Went for an interview with a well known brand, and they are going to have an offshore team build their basic Service cloud capability (OOB) and then later enhance it, because they trust their SI… No mention of BA’s, Testing, Integration… can you see any problems here?

Confession #717

Have a client who envisions having a front-end web form for case creation that asks at most two questions, with no more than 5 picklist values, and somehow magically routes things correctly to one of 150+ different provider groups without human intervention.

Confession #716

Salesforce Marketing: Our platform allows you to do anything! So customizable! So flexible for your business needs!

Salesforce Support: So once you customize something from OOTB features, we can no longer support it.

Confession #715

“We’ll never use 32k characters in this field. That’s more than enough!”
Yes, I have it in writing. Yes, a record just hit that limit. No, I’m not going to “just change it”.

Confession #714

The best is when the CEO unintentionally deletes an entire custom object instead of deleting a specific record…and then the rest of the organization responds with…WTF

Confession #713

I’ve seen thousands of data loads gone wrong and had to clean up hundreds of “Inactive Picklist” values because of it. Remember to check your data **before** you upload it.

Confession #712

A custom field on the account object. Not on any page layout. Updated by Process Builder for Opportunity, conditioned to run only when account belongs to Division ‘A’. The field is on 8 report types, and only appears on one report written for Division ‘B’.

Confession #711

Before my time, we moved to SF from two different CRM tools, to this day (almost 10 years later) I’m still finding duplicate fields on the same object (example on contacts we have “status” and “contact status”).

Confession #710

The Case Object was renamed and hijacked for a rarely used QA process. Then a ticketing system with LESS functionality than a basic Support Process was implemented that has cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of several years.

Confession #709

Our original Admin decided that a field was no longer needed/used. She changed the API name to have an ‘x’ at the beginning. 30 seconds after hitting save the help desk phone started ringing. A lot.

Confession #708

Working with Managed Package issues in Production.

Confession #707

I deleted one custom field that blew up 40+ reports, 3 dashboards, and two weeks of my life.

Confession #706

Walked in after a holiday to find out that one of our new employees refreshed the full sandbox without telling us.

Confession #705

Started consulting on a project that gave us no access to Production. I worked on it for a year and never saw Production…ever.

Confession #704

Company owner wanted a bonus and commission structure for a team of ten sales reps, paid proportionally only when the customer paid us. COO and I fought him, this will take five people nine months to do and isn’t worth it. He pushed anyway, we built it, and he scrapped it in month 11…

Confession #702

Legal firm created 1 case record type for each legal trial they prosecuted. We received a call when they attempted to add their 301st client (exceeding the maximum number of allowable record types).

Confession #701

Accidentally created 16,000 blank records in addition to what was meant to be uploaded with my first data load. Learned how to mass delete shortly after.

Confession #700

I inherited an org of 80 users with 23 System Administrators and 25 profiles because no one understood permissions! Most of these users felt they “know their way around Salesforce” enough to keep their access. *cringe* First thing I did was the tough job of breaking the news to users and C-Level execs that their Salesforce access was demoted.

Confession #699

For our Case object we have 50 record types & 97 page layouts & multiple assignment rules. This is making a move to Lightning a major challenge. We have so many javascript buttons on page layouts but knowing which page layouts are even used would massively simplify the migration effort.

Confession #698

Ran out of fields on the Account so have an object called Account2

Confession #697

We have an object called Account_backup and Contact_backup which were created during a migration. But we don’t need them any more, but I cannot persuade the team to delete them.

Confession #696

Today I had to provide step-by-step instructions to a Sales Rep on how to access a report in a folder with his name on it. Somehow the first time wasn’t clear enough & he needed me to repeat this three times.

Confession #695

A C level exec yelled at me saying “I’m the f**king C*O I get whatever access I want”.

Confession #694

When you’re building a new ORG and the new license doesn’t have Data.com so they pull Data.com from your existing ORG and basically destroy your data.

Confession #693

Client demands we move fast in order to save money, complains we’re moving too fast for them to keep up with providing the requirements

Confession #692

The user says he couldn’t see all new Leads. Turns out he has been creating Contacts instead.

Confession #691

For entering Leads the customer first created the Account record then attached the Lead to it. Naturally the Lead conversion process did not work very well.

Confession #690

Customer has changed labels of standard fields and then created custom fields with original name of the standard fields that were renamed. Confusing!!!

Confession #689

Salesforce AE sold us on a new Salesforce Org with Lightning Enabled as part of a new contract. We have about 2.5 months to move an org with 8+ years of customizations and tons of data into the new environment. I just found out that we could stay in the current environment and just enable Lightning but this wasn’t mentioned to us before we signed the new agreement.

Confession #688

Giving ‘view all data’ to a profile because an assistant said she needed it

Confession #687

“The password is ‘password’. Don’t tell other people” – quoting my manager

Confession #686

Team member repeatedly leaving their desktop unlocked when they walk away from their desks – with the org open

Confession #685

I found a field in my org that was supposed to be a time stamp but instead of populating the date with a workflow [someone], created a formula field of with ‘Today()’ as the value so it always said todays date

Confession #684

Data, Data, Data quality issues. Mulesoft MDM is hopefully the holy grail)

Confession #683

Change Management is about Adoption, not Training

Confession #682

Director of IT said ‘just put everything in the org in 1 field’

Confession #681

Wrong code deployed to production due to multiple sandboxes and lack of devops tools to keep environments in sync.

Confession #680

When gathering requirements a department lead gave me a dusty binder of handwritten notes and said she was retiring the next day

Confession #679

More profiles than users – 100’s

Confession #678

It takes 6 days for Zendesk support to get back to you over their dumpster fire of an integration, so you schedule an 11:00 pm est screen share with the offshore resource just to get it taken care of because the app spiked your API calls by 65k today

Confession #677

We work on 2 week sprints & use multiple environments. I’m the only person on my team who has to reset their password in every environment every single time we refresh an environment; sometimes it doesn’t take and I have to change it on each login. Salesforce support continues to be stumped as to why.

Confession #676

2 identical Validation Rules in the org, created minutes apart. The only difference is that they execute on different record types…. because the Admin who created them didn’t know how to use “OR” in the formula.

Confession #675

Too much customization. Too many lines of Apex code. Excessive permissions for business users.

Confession #674

User called up help desk to ask for the URL for salesforce.com

Confession #673

Customer wanted to develop on Heroku using air-gapped secure systems (not connected to internet).

Confession #672

New Non-profit Admin disabled all our Sandboxes. He got Salesforce to fix it, still not sure how he did it.

Confession #671

Customer had objects (Multiple) with the same labels but different API Names that did different things in the data model. And then wanted a custom integration built within 30 days.

Confession #670

My company had 3 stage fields on the opportunity.

Confession #669

Anyone with “login-as” user access could login as system admin and make changes… ANY changes.

Confession #668

No leads associated with accounts. ALL leads have a “company” field.

Confession #667

100+ fields on Opportunity, data so bad that the object is not query-able for reporting.

Confession #666

My CEO requested a checkbox that made no sense whatsoever. When I tried to ask him and understand the real underlying requirement, he answered with “I don’t pay you to think, I pay you to do what I say.” That day I updated my CV. I am now a Solutions Architect.

Confession #665

Modifying Flows in Production.

Confession #664

User loads data. Data is duplicated. User tries to fix. Takes out more than they put in.

Confession #662

A questionable Admin deletes 200 Account records thinking they were in a Sandbox.

Confession #661

We’re at the field limit for 4 standard objects.

Confession #660

We have a picklist set with hundreds of values controlled by a picklist set with about 40 values. Each time a new value is added, the controlling field needs to be updated.

Confession #659

Had a client that had 2 admin departments. They had more than a few duplicate (identical) fields on the Opportunity object and would use Profiles to control visibility. Same exact label. Same picklist values. Slightly different api name.

Confession #658

Testing something in Prod finds problems faster then Sandboxes

Confession #657

That special moment when you look in a #Salesforce org and stumble on a Lead Record Type called “New Task on Lead.”

Confession #656

Instead of using the “merge” function, lighter heads have decided to go with an account type called “archive” where we move all the duplicate Accounts and set this data type on “hide” so that no one can see that the account was already introduced twice in the system… Every following duplicate entry will then be “archived”.

Confession #655

We created a second “Account Team” object, because the project manager at the time of implementing Salesforce – wanted to replicate with name and all, an object from our old CRM System. Now that she is gone, guess what project we are starting: “SF Back to Standard..” yup…

Confession #654

We have 1.2 million Accounts in Salesforce. We connected our Salesforce with “a very important system – the future of the company” that can only process maximum 40 records at a time without having to restart all the interfaces and servers.

Confession #653

Debug functionality doesn’t work, have to keep changing the run time in 15 min increments to test any changes in Flow. Using Sub Flows of the actual actions so can use the debug mode.

Confession #652

Critical Update breaks processes. If you use PRIORVALUE in a formula and the PRIORVALUE is null, it breaks. So watch out for Check for Null Record Variables or Null Values of Lookup Relationship Fields in Process and Flow Formulas. Need to make a simple process to see if I can get something to send to support.

Confession #651

Our Business has created 10,000+ new Email templates(Word Doc) that needs to be migrated in a certain folder. Is there a better way to migrating them all at once rather than doing them manually.

Confession #650

I’m a new admin and have a lot of doubts. I really would like to talk more with people from salesforce admin, to take my doubts and to gain some experience. Is this kind of possible? 🙂

Confession #649

Reminds me of a place where the dev made his own custom contact and account objects called Person and Organization, because they didn’t like the label.

Confession #648

As a consultant I can often confirm the words “we just want to make one small change” in a scope review brings a sense of dread.

Confession #647

2 Fields: Sub Total & Subtotal

Confession #646

It feels like SF apply a Fibonacci sequence to the time delay of each successive change set being ready to deploy in Prod. #GetItRightFirstTime

Confession #645

We found someone using an ETL tool to move data from a Salesforce Org right back to the same Salesforce Org to work TL tool to move data from a Salesforce Org right back to the same Salesforce Org to work around order of operations and system limits. Clever and tragic all at once.

Confession #644

Client has 280 record types on the Account and every time they got a new customer they added new fields.

Confession #643

As part of a large project, I deploy 3 List Views via a Change Set. 4 days later, our Sr. Strategy Manager (and Project Manager & owner of our Org) deletes the 3 List Views. 10 Days later, asks me to investigate why users can’t see those List Views that were required for the project. Sometimes I feel like a hamster running in a wheel.

Confession #642

My favorite API Naming:

API Name: Apples_c, label: Bananas

API Name: Apples1__c, label: Apples

Confession #641

Support call yesterday. Panic as @elements_cloud didn’t seem to be calculating %filled for standard field “Middle Name” correctly. Fortunately, able to pop the @elements_cloud right panel in the Contact record and it page showed that a previous Admin had created a CUSTOM field “Middle Name” and that was on page layout and was being populated, not the standard field.

Confession #640

One drink for simply using Clicktools. The company has been bought & sold several times over the last few years & fails to update their support reference resources. You’re 10x more likely to hit a broken link or phone. Got an email to close my case (references their old & current owner), the link sends me to an undeliverable email. :fail:

Confession #639

Turns out the permission set assignments don’t deploy on the change set – as any sane person would expect.

Confession #638

Solo Admin was told “Your technical questions are perceived as you being difficult and trying to create roadblocks. Don’t ask questions. It’s your problem to figure out.” Advice from the ecosystem “Find a new job”.

Confession #637

One of my clients orgs got upgraded to spring 20 on Friday and it’s breaking critical functionality around force.com sites. Have some functionality that sends emails and it’s failing with INSUFFICIENT_ACCESS_ON_CROSS_REFERENCE_ENTITY. I don’t get why these security changes weren’t released as critical updates like everything else.

Confession #636

Having the bi-weekly conversation with your manager in which you have to explain, again, why you won’t just email them the password to a website. And point them, again, to the password manager they have installed and explain how it works.

Confession #635

I must have accidentally deleted my trailhead org that I was doing an Aura module in that only had 1 section left. Welp, its required for Advanced Apex Specialist superbadge… doh.

Confession #634

I have been informed that I need to dedicate time to a Jira integration that needs to move to production this weekend. The above statement wouldn’t be so bad if I had been involved in any part of the project up to this point. I spun up a dev sandbox like 5 months ago for a user…that was the last time I heard anything about the project. I have no documentation… No scope. No sense of what needs to be done. I was told that if I’m not available, I could always make that user an admin and just let him do what he needs to do.

Confession #633

Processes that don’t use “Do you want to execute the actions only when specified changes are made to the record?” and screw everything up when you do a data update.

Confession #632

Work on implementing Salesforce for 8 months including some really complex automation. Go to three separate sites across Canada in the middle of winter to deliver in-person training. The thing that the Sales users are most excited about is the confetti when they close an opportunity…. Thanks Salesforce product management.

Confession #631

Discovered 128 sharing rules on a single Object, and there are less than 600 records in that Object.

Confession #630

Someone didn’t understand multi-currency so created a new salesforce org for each country.

Confession #629

Logged into the AppExchange, connected my related accounts, and then got 11 Welcome to the Community emails to the same email address.

Confession #628

We’ve invested a fortune in all things Salesforce and we’re having to cut back on all non-mission critical areas, like Org documentation and impact analysis.

Confession #627

Developers are never able to replicate issues reported by the testers in their machines. Now, who can tell them that we are not going to deploy their machine for the end-users?

Confession #626

Was using a Lightning Component built by a developer in a Customer Community, which was always giving an error. Did a ton of debugging over 3 days virtually checking each line, profile, access, sharing, browser; and finally found that the object was still in “Development” status, and not in “Deployed” status.

Confession #625

Migrating from Dynamics and Insightly to Salesforce, with 2 (what was guaranteed that they were separate DB’s)once imported and merged. Found out that 80K contacts were duplicated.

Confession #624

I think I am on the most annoying conference call of my life. I’ve gotta live tweet this just to stay sane.

Let’s start with the presenter, a #developer has the slowest Mac I’ve seen since my iMac days.

He starts by complaining that it’s 9:30 pm for him. Guess what time it is for the rest of us, buddy? And guess who didn’t respond to our requests for a meeting DURING THE DAY that we’ve been sending all week?

And now, of course, he mysteriously stops screen sharing while he “works.” I didn’t give up my night to hear a keyboard clacking.

Hey, conceited, I get that you’re a fancy #developer and all, but we all understand XML … because we wrote the XML we gave you.

Behind the scenes, the person who hired this guy messages me, “I want to punch a hole in a wall right now.” Truer words, my friend…

Now he’s getting super defensive. “I didn’t know this call was supposed to be about this. I didn’t know this was due tomorrow.” It’s not due tomorrow, it was due two weeks ago.

Sooooo happy there’s a Project Manager on this talking sense. Thank you for bringing us back to the point. #ILoveProjectManagers

Our developer: Go to line 21 and make this exact change

Evil developer: Okay, just tell me what you want me to do

WHY DOES IT TAKE YOU 5 MINUTES TO DELETE A CHARACTER?!?!?!

I love that instructions we gave at the very beginning of the project … last August … are still being ignored. Seriously, I love being ignored. Love it.

Confession #623

Our opportunity object has 400 fields, some of which are formula fields that are used to display an image in other fields alerting the user viewing the record whether they are the record owner.

Confession #622

Purchased a full sandbox for the first time to use during a massive SF revamp project. Did not realize that, unlike in dev sandboxes, community user data is not masked. Added community user profile to new sandbox community and inadvertently sent 50,000 welcome emails to users who had been in our community for years.

Confession #621

We’ve got a custom object named: Opportunity Product

Confession #620

So you wanna laugh? Here you go and it’s not even our fault! It’s Salesforce’s fault and we are stuck with it So we chose our my domain thoughtfully… LOVE.my.salesforce.com Be honest…. beautifully crafted. Genius right?!

Until you actually have it and everytime you log-in in Lightning it seems to add some characters before it actually propagates. You wanna know what we see in those split seconds?

Love…..

WAIT FOR IT….!!!

Love.c-um.my salesforce.com

Really Salesforce?!!!

Confession #619

Just started new role. So far, I have logged into 4 different Salesforce Orgs using 3 different username/passwords…. not including Trailhead

Confession #618

We have a confetti of CRAPlications. Lots of tactical little apps. Maybe that is why we have 757 custom objects.

Confession #617

Called a Custom Object Custom_Object__c and wondered why LEX was behaving strange…

Confession #616

Out of 12 users, 10 are admin including an outside marketing company. Nobody can explain why an outside company needs admin privileges but the CEO doesn’t want it changed. He’s also upset that the sales team doesn’t really use SF but he doesn’t want me spending “too much time” making it more user friendly and training the sales team, since SF admin isn’t my primary job. He hasn’t logged in for over 10 months.

Confession #615

This week in a Spring20 sandbox, my company realized that several pages of our Communities had broken thanks to new permission restrictions for Guest Users due to become mandatory on March 1. The release notes instructed how to reconfigure your org “if needed,” but didn’t explain why you might need to do so.

Confession #614

When someone offhandedly mentions that they’re expecting you to deploy features by Monday. Work is done (thankfully), but now I have to go through the process of getting an expedited release approved since it wasn’t documented anywhere.

Confession #613

My soon to be old boss, 3 more days and I am moving to a new job, has me filling out a long “How to do what Jim does document”. There is a section entitled “How to write reports”.
1: grab pencil
2: grab paper
3: write ‘R’
4: write ‘eport’
5: add an ‘s’ if plural
You have now written Reports

Confession #612

Working in a Sandbox for a client that hasn’t exactly performance-tuned in a while. Loading a Contact page took over 10 seconds. In Classic.

Confession #611

My previous employer was in a hurry about everything and could not effective prioritize needs. As a result, when I left I was never able to implement an accurate security model. I honestly feel bad for the admin that replaced me for the mess I had to leave behind.

Confession #610

We have a “ThorSt” field… for formatting a date as the 4″th” or 1″st”

Confession #609

Our CEO gave himself admin rights to add a custom field on the Account Object, the custom field was called ‘Industry’.

Confession #608

So we have salesforce at work and I have been given admin rights. I really want to look into learning properly and get my admin certification. Is this best to do via trailhead modules?

Confession #607

I’ve been running reports for senior managers for almost a year. Had to update a dashboard and realized that one report has been set to 1/1/16-12/31/16, presumably since 2016. No one has noticed.

Confession #606

I just accidentally removed system admin access to a community and now I can’t access the page to add it back.

Confession #605

Completed an org merge project only to have the client dissolve one of the entities once done.

Confession #604

Dumbfounded by an issue, couldn’t even figure out what happened / changed that tests weren’t passing in org. Did a ton of debugging, checking field changes, perusing the Audit log.. Eventually figured it out.. someone disabled Email Deliverability in this sandbox.

Confession #603

Have an org with fewer than 40 users. 4 of them are system admins, including the integration user who for some reason has full system admin access.

Confession #602

Worked at a place with 2+ million contacts attached to a single Account record named “Individual”. They turned on an integration to allow people to self-service update contact information. Bad things happened.

Confession #601

Had to explain to CEO for the 3rd time that you can’t have 1 field answering 2 questions because it invalidates the data. But they get personally offended every time.

Confession #600

During a conf call. Saying to your colleague (who is not in the call, just sitting next to you) that this conf is boring. And then realize that YOU ARE NOT ON MUTE.

Confession #599

If I can’t test escalation rules in a Sandbox, how am I supposed to know that they work before putting them in production?

Confession #598

Marketing guy goes through all new Accts created by CS reps, cks to make sure not dup, if is dup adds contracts to old Acct, ok great. But doesn’t communicate w/ CS Rep or their manager to teach them how or where to search b4 creating the new Acct. He just deletes the dup. When I explain why I changed delete privileges and about teaching, training the CS Reps and their manager, he’s not happy.

Confession #597

My sales team wants to change the Multi-select picklist (that I tried to convince them was a bad idea 4 months ago) to a regular picklist.

Confession #596

Who demands deployment to go live 1/1? Seriously?

Confession #595

Hello! I am brand new to Salesforce, we just fully launched last week – yay!

Confession #594

Customer had datestamp ’16.dic.2019′ They wondered why and said it’s been there since they got Salesforce… Their admin had changed the region settings resulting in a foreign language timestamp a week ago.

Confession #593

Talked to a potential client about an org merge for 20 minutes at the end of which they said that we would not be able to see the data due to restrictions with their customers, even with an NDA. They were very surprised when I said that seeing the data was paramount.

Confession #592

Client asks you to update the Account Type field, but they have a custom Type__c field and they renamed the standard one to Vertical, and you choose the wrong one in Data Loader.. #StopRenamingStuff

Confession #591

I had a manager who decided they wanted to take a shot at playing admin…in Production. Don’t worry…I’d find out once it broke because they’d shamelessly come to me telling me to fix it. They constantly complained about other teams not following change management though…

Confession #590

We created a Sandbox with a ton of demo content for our entire sales and consulting team to show off our product. It was first used at Dreamforce so they named it DF-Demo. So after Dreamforce it was deleted. Doh!!!

Confession #589

And then there’s the user who was getting Approval Process emails for Opps. He just had to hit Reply, type Y or N, then hit Send. But that was too much work for him. He wanted to know if there was a way he could just reply and not have to type Y or N. Like Salesforce could magically divine whether to approve or reject it….

Confession #588

Found a permission set named “Basic Reporting.” In addition to granting basic reporting privileges, it also granted Modify All.

Confession #587

Posted in Lightning! NOW Success Community “Do we need to make any changes in existing customizations and configurations before Lightning transition? If so,let me know the issues that may occur.”

Confession #586

User says they are not getting Chatter emails. Sent them a screenshot of their inbox with the chatter emails visible. They still don’t believe me.

Confession #585

Discovered client making changes in Prod and in Sandbox (that are not the same) days after the deployment.

Confession #584

Comment from Project Manager in JIRA user story: “Proper test data cannot be created in UAT with reasonable effort within the given timeframe. We will validate in production”…

Confession #583

Custom owner field on Account.

Confession #582

Having to add 3 picklists to Case for birthdate (day, month, year) cbeause that is how the legacy system they are migrating from is formatted. It gets better, day is a number range of 01-21, month 01-12, and year 1900-2020.

Confession #581

When you’re on a “code freeze” and your manager says to “just do it in production”. :sob:

Confession #580

CSV “parser” working by splitting file content by ‘n’ and ‘;’. Until they realized that fields may contain new lines, commas or semicolons…

Confession #579

Client asks you to merge over a 1000 dupes.

Confession #578

Had to rewrite a bunch of stories because the person who created them didn’t capture all of the requirements and actually left a bunch of open questions before they were assigned out.

Confession #577

I was talking to our Sales Manager and commented “Our org looks like it was set up by a hyperactive two year old”……..he responded “Are you calling me a toddler? I built it”

Confession #576

We hired a large partner to help us with our Salesforce Implementation. One of the business requirements was for the ability to add an attachment on an opportunity, and then classify it from a set list of values. At the end of the sprint when the partner demoed the functionality, what we got was a field called “Attachments” with the list of drop down values. Say what???

Confession #575

In attempting to find out why users were able locked fields during a training, we discovered that for the training, 26 individuals had been given system admin level access to the staging sandbox just weeks before deployment to production & go live. It was not a good morning for our blood pressure.

Confession #574

We have one user account that is used by all team members.

Confession #573

Our org cannot assign the correct records to your org. Can you create an error on your end so both cancel each other out?

Confession #572

We have two checkboxes in Cases: one for “Open”, and one for “Closed”.

Confession #571

In 2007ish (prior to me having a sandbox) I turned on person accounts to see what they did. I wasn’t able to turn them off. Luckily some nice person at salesforce took pity on me and helped me hide all of it.

Confession #570

Code review: reviewers arguing about spaces vs tabs, variable names and similar trivial stuff, and no one checks the actual logic.

Confession #569

I worked with a large food delivery company as a BA and we had a Tech Architect who never documented his solutions and he got his cronies to do the Dev work. He was being paid a ton of money to work from Eastern Europe. We had 3 projects running in the same sprint for 6 months. I tried to bring in elements.cloud for processing mapping and it was shot down… There was no pre-prod testing to a back-end system and when we went live the team spent 2 months fixing all the defects. We did not even have a QA capability at the time.

Confession #568

In 2010 or 2011 I can’t remember we had an accidental chatter implementation. We never found out who (wasn’t in the audit trail), but someone turned on chatter. Even better was I was on vacation. We weren’t allowed to have chatter on for compliance. Turned into a huge thing.

Confession #567

I got my first Sandbox in 2007 (after begging for about 2 years). I remember building my first workflow rule in it and being so excited I could test. I wanted to test what happened when I loaded data against contact records (object where workflow fired against). The workflow would send an email when a contact went to a certain status welcoming them as a customer. I thought that the emails would get changed on contacts like they did for users. Woops. I emailed around 200 customers welcoming them and confused a ton of people.

Confession #566

Earlier in my career I didn’t know how to effectively communicate risk, whether it be technical risk or strategic risk. So there was a senior executive pushing to have us do a release the same weekend as a salesforce release. I kept trying to tell her not to do it,but I wasn’t good at articulating why and what the risk was. The risk was that the project hadn’t been tested with the new release, not sure why I just didn’t say that, but I was scared for some reason. So we went live. So many errors because the release was happening.

Confession #565

My colleague decided it would be a good idea to put an identifier in the API name of fields so we could track which BU the field was for. So Contact_Date__c became MKTG_Contact_Date__c. I told her it was a good idea but didn’t realize she was doing it in prod. All of the sudden all of our apex and integrations stopped working. She didn’t realize that is how apex, integrations and other tools were querying our fields. Woops.

Confession #564

All developers working on the same sandbox. No version control. Accidental overwriting was so common that we started to make local copies of our code.

Confession #563

In 2008 I recorded a bunch of training videos where you could see me talking and showing some sales process. Without realizing it my fly was down and for about 20 minutes of this video you could see that my fly was open and I was wearing red underwear. I wanted to die. I wasn’t sure which was worse that the video editor put this in or that no one in the room told me my fly was down. I now check my fly before every presentation. I have OCD about it.

Confession #562

Changed misspelled object API name. I don’t care what happened next.

Confession #561

In 2007 I worked at a company where we had two divisions sharing 1 org and had a crazy data firewall. Not fully understanding the firewall or how the sharing worked, I moved a user from one side of the firewall to the other by changing their role. I was being lazy and didn’t read any of the documentation the consultancy provided and didn’t move records to another user first. I exposed all of this users records from the other side of the firewall to everyone on the new side of the firewall which contained non public info. I didn’t realize what I did right away until my colleague realized all of the data was exposed. I’m really lucky they didn’t fire me. It was around this point in my career I became super diligent about reading instructions and documentation.

Confession #560

When I first used the data loader (it was actually called the Lexi Loader at the time) I just made a spreadsheet of what I wanted to update and loaded. No backup, no testing, just updated a ton of Opps. Nothing bad happened, but do not do this! Take backups! Test your upload!

Confession #559

I worked for an organization that had over 200 custom objects and a million lines of code. We had built out a very nice system that provided End to End processing for all departments in Salesforce, globally. The problem, our developer wrote test classes that faked out the system instead of actually testing. SUPER SCARY. A younger developer on the team tried to make a case for writing correct test classes and it was shot down.

Confession #558

A new developer at work installed our own managed package in our main development org. Pure havoc!

Confession #557

We have users that send me contact info to update via email. They have Salesforce licenses…

Confession #556

Refreshed myself out of a week’s worth of work once…

Confession #555

I was hired as a Solution Architect for a large UK phone company. They had hired an offshore company to build the CRM capability. This offshore then brought in people by the plane load as Solution Architect’s (most of these were grads). I stayed 5 months and left. They promised to go-live in Apr 19. It’s now Dec… and they have gone live with a subset of the original payload…

Confession #554

In my experience, the huge partners are the worst out there. They come in with semi-competent to knowledgeable people during the sales pitches, and then once the contract is signed, the work is farmed out to overseas developers with minimal training or knowledge. Even the ‘local’ team that continues to work with you is questionable. I have had ‘Technical Architects’ assigned to contracts with < 2 years out of college and 9 months in the Salesforce world. We pay them $250+ an hour and I need to train them. My advice, stick to smaller firms where you really get to know the people that will be doing the work, or better yet, hire people so you can have the skills in house for the future.

Confession #553

Ego can get in the way. The VP of an organization I worked for demanded to have an Administrator login. I felt bullied into providing it and started looking for a new role immediately. Not long after my departure I heard that he had added a sharing rule that resulting in every case for every customer being exposed to ALL customers. I was not surprised, he definitely had an issue with details and always believed he was “the smartest person in the room”. I have never looked back.

Confession #552

We did the Lightning Readiness Check and the report was 300 pages long.

Confession #551

We had/have users who pay for their own Zoho license even though they have a SF license.

Confession #550

Discovered a sales rep has been paying for his own salesforce license for 5 years and you get forwarded a recording of him demoing to senior leaders how he uses it to do his day to day AND the company isn’t even live on Salesforce yet. Highlights include him working off of only one activity where he updates the task subject to store future events “It’s great because I see everything in one view”

Confession #549

I cannot see us ever migrating to Lightning. Technical debt is crushing our Org. As an example, we have 800 fields on the Case object.

Zen #14

My org has a 98% – Excellent rating for the Security Health Check, the only thing stopping us from full marks is disabling the ‘Login As’ admin feature…and I am not giving that up!

Confession #548

I have to make a minor upgrade to a managed package, but I have lost access to the developer org where the package is. The old developer is no longer working with us but we own the Org. I have the login/password for the org where the package is stored but I’m being asked for a verify code that is sent to an invalid email address :'(

Confession #547

Our org has definitely upped our automation and we have come to the point where we are hitting governing limits, the fun SOQL queries 101 error. 99% of our automation is done through Process Builder and I have combined as many processes as I can into one or two processes per object. But we are still hitting errors. And of course it is causing havoc for myself as the admin and our users.

Confession #546

It takes a long time to run a report to extract 63K records and exporting it in Lightning. I thought it was our internet connection issue. But I’ve heard another Lightning user in another company saying she’d switch back to classic when running reports.

Confession #545

My employer made a stupid decision a few months ago to replace half of the team working on the CRM technology team with a partner that is providing 100% offshore resources. The offshore team is so bad even if I send them requirements with correct spelling they misspell everything. When I was at Dreamforce they were supposed to add two fields “product count” and “subscription count” along with some automation. I came back from Dreamforce to see that we have fields have been misspelled and called “product_c*nt” and “subscription_c*nt”. (replace * with u). Because these fields are referenced in apex they refused to fix the API name. This is a huge salesforce partner. This is the quality of work they provide.

Confession #544

I read OrgConfessions while I’m waiting on my change sets to validate! Guilty pleasure.

Zen #13

I am feeling very virtuous right now. EVERY ONE of the critical updates has been reviewed and activated! (OK, it’s a fairly new org, but still….)

Confession #543

Salesforce blocked JS in hyperlinks in formulae. So we use another JS in record VF page to inject it back…

Confession #542

How to check if an old feature is indeed not used and can be removed? Let’s remove it quietly from production and see if someone complains…

Confession #541

I inherited an org that did ALL activities on task records and couldn’t sync to basic Outlook calendars…so everything was manual. What’s a sync?

Confession #540

After 2 years work from a GSI and we still have only 20 of our 2,500 users have gone live.

Confession #539

We have a huge Org with over 750k customizations. We’ve had 4 consultancies work on the Org over the last 8 years, but there is no documentation.

Confession #538

I am postponing my Admin exam because everyone seem to be failing it.

Confession #537

I was hired as the Service Cloud admin. I was told their existing “floater” type admin was certified as an admin and dev 1 and has set up email to case a year before. Imagine my surprise when I logged into their org and saw they had ZERO case assignment rules. Yep, none. Their floater admin actually had no certs at all and was a compulsive liar about what had been set up in their org. He even told the users that list views were called “Queues”. I had to make drawings with little stick figures so they could understand that a queue was a group of users that owned cases and not a list view. That was a hard day.

Confession #536

I have users that will write an email to their coordinators instructing them how to update account details. They believe it is faster to write an email and the field values (many of which are picklist) instead of doing it themselves.

Confession #535

Claims manager at an insurance company thought it normal to take claim files into the men’s room with him while he used the stall.

Confession #534

I asked an end user to grant me login access and provided a step-by-step procedure with screenshots on how to navigate from setup. User provided her credentials instead.

Confession #533

The last person to manage my org didn’t know you could create new profiles for new users. They kept reusing and reissuing old profiles under new usernames. Now every time these users need to reset their passwords I have to reset their secret question too. It’s also made historical auditing all but impossible.

Confession #532

Contacts got 30+ email reminders this morning for “Submit Your Meeting Reimbursement” with a value of $0.00. Someone was testing workflow email in production? Worked out the issue. One of the developers was updating this workflow to ensure the emails will only send if nothing has been submitted, and unfortunately they did not disable email before updating every campaign….

Confession #531

Did a SOW for moving a client from NPSP2 to NPSP3, no custom profiles in the entire system because every one of their 8 users is a system admin.

Confession #530

Sales has purchased a product that requires 83 fields (!) on the Account object that will be used by only 1 user.

Confession #529

A previous consultant used the entire URL to reference an image location in an image formula for 22 different picklist values in a Case() function.

Confession #528

When my manager asks me to update Next Steps for case resolution on a spreadsheet version of the Cases Open report, when I have an Admin Notes field included on the Case record page and pulling into the same report coming out of SF.

Confession #527

Just found this. A field is a picklist. And each line is a description of a product… We have more than 1000 products… Kill me now.

Confession #526

The User wants a checkbox instead of a yes/no picklist because it’s one “extra” click.

Confession #525

When a snr manager was given admin powers and the first thing they do is change OWD on price books, deleting all the sharing rules; so no one can use price books including CPQ.

Confession #524

Just found this gem where the original implementation partner added a permission set from a trailhead module in my client’s production org.

Confession #523

When you review a feature that was built a year ago, and wonder how someone could’ve designed such a poor experience and then immediately come up with a better solution, and then realize the person who built it originally was you.

Confession #522

To whatever Salesforce engineer required a date format of YYYY-MM-DD to import, yet made Salesforce export dates as MM/DD/YYYY, I hope you’re happy with yourself.

Confession #521

That super fun moment when you go into a brand new org and see that there are separate profiles for every function in the company, but it doesn’t matter because not a single one of them has a single restriction. Everyone is an admin right now.

Confession #520

Just spent an hour troubleshooting problems with a deployment and code coverage that had been good in another sandbox, but was moved and then modified in a different sandbox. I fixed test coverage on the new code, but some of the old code kept having a problem of being uncovered. I finally realized that the person who had modified the code before me had used a “code formatter” that inserted extra spaces in strings inside of certain If statements. Those strings never matched of course, so the code in the main class was never called.

Confession #519

You build a new data model and migrate data only to realize the sandbox hasn’t been refreshed since 2018 and the site/VF/Apex that need updating don’t even exist.

Confession #518

When you build solution v1 and your customer says you didn’t understand the requirements, so you documented the requirements for v2 and then they change the requirements after you’ve built v2.

Confession #517

Run Salesforce Optimizer to find 44 inactive users! The answer from the team was, oh they might need them 😐

Confession #516

I once managed to bulk update 200+ Contacts to have the same last name as one of my coworkers. No idea how that happened . . . .

Confession #515

First implementation of SFDC service cloud was driven by a well known Salesforce implementation partner. They created duplicate fields containing same value but in one object formatted as number and in other object formatted as text… A number of custom fields did not have description. Lines and lines of codes. Best practices out the window!

Confession #514

Just started at a new company. The previous admin had zero knowledge of Salesforce existence prior to being the SF Admin. The Manager? Can’t decipher config vs. code decisions. Rolling up the sleeves…..

Confession #513

A customer created new fields on a custom object and removed the visibility for all profiles – including the SysAdmin. Now he wonders why no one can see / use them

Confession #512

Lightning Object Creator is my worst nightmare. Admins can create an object with data directly in production with no business analysis, architectural design and no documentation.

Confession #511

Product owner wants to make all the inside sales people the SuperUsers to go to for questions – regardless of their (lack of) technical skills, rather than choosing 1 person per team designated as the techy-superuser. Adoption will suffer!

Confession #510

I recently encountered an unfortunate issue with a large custom object I was building; the total number of fields was under the 500 limit, but the object included over 264 formula fields using a CASE statement on a picklist field in the object. Long story short, the object won’t display in Lightning Experience, only Salesforce Classic. The workaround I’m going for involves converting these 264 formula fields to text fields that are then populated by Process Builder using the criteria from the picklist field. I’m a little nervous that I might “break” Process Builder, too…

Confession #509

We now have over 2,000 custom objects in the Org.

Confession #508

6 months ago I had no idea what Salesforce was. I was made the Admin and I am the only one, learning from Trailhead. I have now inherited 3 Orgs and have been asked to merge them but there are so many duplicated fields, I have no idea where to start.

Confession #507

We’ve rolled Salesforce out to the worldwide organizations so now we have 800 objects in our Org. And I am the solo Admin.

Confession #506

My org, my confession… None of my validation rules were firing – PANIC!!!! Yup, we had a custom setting that allowed me to turn them off for just me. There was also a custom setting for turning them off for the whole org. Guess which one I checked? No idea when…..

Confession #505

My org, not my confession. Company dashboards kept being deleted. Fortunately, I was able to restore them easily and see who deleted them. When I asked why they were doing it: Oh god did I delete them from the entire system? I just didn’t want them listed under my recent dashboards because those dashboards weren’t useful for me to have. Sorry if that caused any issues!

Confession #504

12 million lines of undocumented Apex code, down from 18 million. We can’t get code coverage so have exception from Salesforce to allow us to deploy.

“I am a solo Admin for 300 Orgs.”
“Don’t you mean users?”
“No, 300 Production Orgs.”

Confession #502

We have maxed out fields on Case….again

Confession #501

We have 450 custom fields on Opportunity (we’re only allowed 500 in our edition)

Confession #500

When you are all set to present a @Dreamforce session and do an interview at a major keynote and the airline LOSES your one and only checked bag the cherry on top is the person they think took it is on a Disney cruise

Confession #499

We uploaded wrong data file into Products and ended up with 30k SKUs.

Confession #498

Client insisted that we split each FSL combo order into separate orders. We ran the job over the weekend and they came on Mon and had 30,000 jobs to separately update and schedule. We did warn them.

Confession #497

If we don’t have time for UAT and we’re not 100% sure it’ll work we just tell the users it’s beta release and to be extra vigilant

Confession #496

For the Case object we created a huge VisualForce page to only display certain fields based on record type, but they never developed that filter functionality. So everyone sees every field.

Confession #495

After our organization was bought, integration of systems with our new parent only could take place via Excel files. What about updates I asked? It would only work if the files are in the same format and column order. Or else the macro would not function! In 2019…

Confession #494

Object for tracking cases with 197 fields

Confession #493

When first using Salesforce, at a time when sandboxes did not yet exist, I added a Validation Rule to the Account object assuming it would apply only on the user interface and not knowing that it would also generate errors in external integration processes which insert/update Account records…

Confession #492

Huge corporation with Salesforce department, which provides services to our clients. In our SF instance we have a cross-project repository with re-usable code snippets. During cost cuts all of our dept’s licenses have been downgraded to Chatter ones, so we lost access to our project repository. Upper management probably isn’t even aware of impact of that cut.

Confession #492

Software house and big corp. There is no black list of forbidden software – there is a white list. Every exception needs to be processed by financial dept, legal dept, IT dept and so on, which can take weeks. Recently our IDE has been approved, at last. Did I mention that Chrome extensions are white listed as well?

Confession #491

“Automation” done by browser scripts that simulate user actions (clicking, opening pages and so on). Why bother with API?

Confession #490

Implementation by GSI. Phase 1 went live for core business. But architectural decisions for Phase 2, which was roll-out to 200 franchisees, were not considered during Phase 1. Go live attempted for Phase 2 for 5 franchisees 3 times, but finally pulled it out and they had to go back to their MS Access app.

Confession #489

Sandbox refresh procedure with almost 100 (one hundred) steps.

Confession #488

Org with 225 users. 196 were System Admins.

Confession #487

More people need to confess this one, as I know it has happened to a lot of people. Refreshed a sandbox that had changes that had not deployed yet.

Confession #486

As a consultant, ran an import to Production to the wrong Salesforce Org ….meaning a different company.

Confession #485

I was looking to add a related list to a page and noticed there was a SolarBot list available. Then I went to the Object Manager and found the SolarBot and SolarBot Status objects in prod. The new team member did a little Trailhead in production.

Confession #484

“Accounting” profile with 20+ sys admin type permissions plus Knowledge and Lead Management permissions. Who’d have thought to audit for that? Unfortunately, not me until a user unknowingly made a global change.

Confession #483

I do org cleanup for fun and survival. I could eat this elephant for a year.

Confession #482

I make changes in production while enforcing BAs to make changes in sandbox. #TooPressedForTime #NoExcuse

Confession #481

Inherited org with 18 quote record types created solely to place a different button on the page layout…a button that could have been dynamic on a single record type or two.

Confession #480

23 triggers on Opportunity, 16 of which are to create assets – a different trigger for each unit of measure an asset can have. #BeforeHeWasMVP

Confession #479

During org merge consulting company essentially buried sys admin level permissions in a permission set assigned to 100 users….first symptom was hard-coded view/link in customer community repeatedly disappearing. So much fun to chase down when you’re new to an org.

Confession #478

New admin in 10-year old org – found 251 steps in Case Assignment rules… fortunately now whittled down to 15.

Confession #477

We had a developer who had created some Apex classes for us but then he left the company before everything was put into production. Unfortunately, the only place his code existed was in the Full Sandbox. Guess what happened when we refreshed the Full Sandbox right after he left? Doh!

Confession #476

User signed up for a free trial of AppExchange app, and accepted the terms without verifying with their admin and managers. It turned out the app extracted all the data and started making calls and sending out emails.

Confession #475

Our team of 8 developers share 1 Admin account for Sandbox. We started using SFDX but were not able to use because some of us would get this error after some time: “expired access/refresh token”. Only then we found out about the limit of 5 tokens per Connected App per account.

Confession #474

UAT performed by testers – it’s basically TAT (“tester acceptance testing”). Real users don’t touch any org besides production. Every release has several issues, and criticals are not so rare, but, besides creating a bug in issue tracker, nobody cares about improving that process.

Confession #473

At the beginning of Salesforce implementation project by mistake I enabled multiple currencies on Production org instead on one of many sandbox environments to test it. The step is irreversible. Luckily later we learnt that we needed multiple currencies enabled anyway…

Confession #472

12 year old Org
14 different Admins
7 different SIs
“I’ve been told you can migrate us to Lightning in a month”

Confession #471

I worked with a System Integrator on a client project who built one flow for multiple countries. There was no documentation, no testing, no splitting the flow(s) into smaller manageable buckets, one developer, no error handling, all for a Community platform. I logged 250 odd defects during my time there before we went live…

Confession #470

I’ve adopted an org that uses over 80% of their Apex limit

Confession #469

At my first job I saw the sample recruitment app that salesforce uses as example was configured in production. I don’t know who is that legend who installed it in production. My first task is to delete it from then I started cleaning up orgs it never ended then realized clean up and tech debt should be part of team’s regular work.

Confession #468

In my early days as a developer I developed an Apex Batch used to send documentation to customers through an external printing system: due to a bug on the batch that kept iterating on a customer on and on, that customer received 2000+ printed emails +1 to me!

Confession #467

It was 2008 and I had to import 5,000 leads. The wizard couldn’t match one of the fields and offered “do you want to import this as a note?” Of course! Spent the whole weekend deleting those 5,000 damn notes on every record. And that’s why you always follow the data import testing process before you commit . . . . To add insult to injury I sprained my ankle while running the morning before I did the import so I had to sit on a chair with one leg in air and my finger on the DELETE button.

Confession #466

It’s a lovely day to start to remove some of the 80 fields created years ago with 0% population, and that’s just the Contact object..

Confession #465

CEO and previous admin: “Let’s build a custom CPQ and hard-code product id’s and names into multiple PBW and flows. Plus, we’ll also have different templates for each quote type. As a matter of fact, we’ll add in some Apex codes attached to a project manager with no test classes and push them to production.” 2 years later and with no documentation I’m still putting the pieces together. It’ll probably never be fixed and get abandoned after I’m out of here…

Confession #464

VP of Sales won’t make team use Salesforce for opportunities but then complains there’s no information in Salesforce.

Confession #463

I learned the hard way – when using flow, NEVER put an action object (lookup, create, update, or delete) in a loop, unless you are 100% sure it’s only going to loop a handful of records…and even then…haha. It’s just a great rule of thumb for bulkifying your flows.!

Confession #462

I looked after an org with crazy sharing roles as Directors looked after multiple areas that needed private data. Directors changed responsibilities regularly and before I was trusted to know this in advance and be able to plan I was surprised by it on a regular basis. I once moved a Director and shared all the data between 2 areas and it took me a day to fix the majority but I was also finding odd sharing issues for months.

Confession #461

I actually still remember one major screw up I had in the beginning of my Salesforce career when I was working on a client org and I changed all Admin profile users to a custom role and then nobody could login. We needed to call Salesforce to change our Profiles back. I guess you don’t forget these things even after 7 years.

Confession #460

I worked with a sys admin who decided to update a field on all contact records which had multiple PBW + Flows on and forgot to bulk batch the update or tell anyone and created nearly 80k of monitoring error messages when the updates failed which the out of hours on call team had no idea what they were or where they came from 🙁 took nearly a week to resolve and update properly.

Confession #459

The company had setup the org with all users with “Manage Public List Views” and a user updated the master list view to show only records she had created and hit save instead of Save As. Which then displayed HIPPA managed data to a lot of people. That was fun one to back into for a resolution.

Confession #458

A company was using visualforce based Community as an ideation portal where internal Salesforce list view was being used on the community. One fine day the admin has updated the list view visibility to “Visible to all users (includes partner and customer portal users)”. And then all the records were visible to all community users.

Confession #457

Our team changed a simple field type and NA79 started having performance issues along with all customers started receiving denial of service alerts from Salesforce.

Confession #456

Someone asked me to do a Dynamics -> SFDC migration in three weeks.

Confession #455

One of my favorites was a company that purchased one marketing platform and ripped their current one without talking to their SFDC admin or having an implementation plan at all!

Confession #454

When the VP wanted the temp to have SysAdmin Role and Profile so they could ‘help with stuff‘ and not have to bother anyone for access…… It was a temp that was helping with basic data cleaning, checking opportunity close dates, update stage & update notes. These were manual tasks that required research for each one and a simple update with manual note. Simple basic access was needed.

Confession #453

I managed an org to org migration for the first time (first time admin, first org transfer). Assumed everything was good because UAT was fine. Deployed new org to first 50 users – then went on vacation for a week out of the country while everything broke.

Confession #452

I also did Confession # 436, however not with salesforce for outlook but lightning for outlook. It was not that it wasn’t properly configured, as the intention was to sync all of the SFDC contacts to outlook, but more of an oversight that all of the outlook contacts were also synced to people’s phones.

I also did Confession 436 – AND NOW I FEEL NOT SO ALONE! I, then spent the 4th of july weekend deleting people from my phone, only to discover I was also deleting them out of Salesforce. Can you say panic-stricke support call at 6am? We were able to restore because it was less than 14 days.

Confession #450

I am trying to determine what automation is executing in a client’s system and why, particularly when a users go through a multi-step approval process for an Opportunity. I approved the first step of an approval and looked at the debug log. Although the debug logs are really difficult to decipher, what I have determined is that that where I see the event WF_CRITERIA_BEGIN, the name of the action is a traditional “workflow rule” if it does not contain underscores. If there are underscores, then action refers to the API name of a “process” (from the process builder). I also know that the order of execution is that workflow rules are executed before processes.

So, given these things, why is it that in my log snippet I have a WFR executing, then a process, then another WFR, then a process, and so on, one right after the other at the same timestamp in the debug log? For instance, “Request_Create_Stage_History_Record” (a process) happens before or simultaneous with “SLA Alert – Executive Director Review” (a WFR), after which other WFRs and processes immediately are logged. I expect that I am not understanding how to read the log or how execution is actually happening. But if the order of execution is true, what explains what I’m seeing?

What I’m trying to get at is ultimately how I would really understand whether one of several automations was making an update that later triggered another to fire, creating an undesired chain of events. How would I know that if they all seem to fire at the same time?

I would LOVE some good documentation or an explanation of how to determine the actual order of what happens and why.

Confession #449

I worked with a System Integrator on a client project who built one flow for multiple countries. There was no documentation, no testing, no splitting the flow(s) into smaller manageable buckets, one developer, no error handling, all for a Community platform. I logged 250 odd defects during my time there before we went live…

Confession #448

Discovered salesperson copies his Salesforce emails into Outlook email, changes the data and mails. No record of the sent email is saved other than his Outlook sent items which is “all he cares about.” Then complains he can’t find anything and that’s a problem with Salesforce.