All About...Salesforce: February 2021

Greetings Fellow Trailblazers, 

I am drafting this email to you on paper because the power has gone out. If you are like me and millions of other Americans today, you’re facing a nasty cold front and some serious ice. One of the silver linings of the pandemic, if there is such a thing, is that I have nowhere to go, and if you’re like me and use Salesforce, you don’t have to make the trek into the office to access your on-premise supporter database. Not everyone is so lucky. 

With the extra time you save in your commute, do you think of ways to get creative with Salesforce adoption and training your users on Salesforce? In the latest Spring ‘21 Release, Salesforce rolled out In-App Learning and some enhancements to In-App Guidance, both tools that provide a more dynamic Salesforce learning experience and “coaching” from within the application. Take a look at the sneak peak below and check out this podcast from Grace Li, Product Manager for In-App Learning, and Guidance Center at Salesforce.

I want to talk about a few security-related updates that are coming in the Summer ‘21 Release. You may have even received an email from Salesforce alerting you of these upcoming changes. The first, Disable Access to Non-global Apex Controller Methods in Managed Packages impacts code that may be in your Salesforce instance from third-party applications that were installed via the AppExchange. The developers for those applications should be aware of the change in Salesforce but now may be a good time to do an audit of your installed third-party applications and uninstall applications that you and your users are no longer using. This won’t completely mitigate the potential issue, but can limit exposure and provide you with motivation to clean up your installed packages. 

The second, Enforce Access Modifiers on Apex Properties in Lightning Component Markup is primarily designed to ensure that security permissions are respected on objects being referenced within Apex code. You should be testing your Aura or Lightning Web Components in your Sandbox during the release preview window and if you have any questions or concerns about these two updates, you can reach out to one of our talented developers, like Max Paquin, who gets really excited talking about Salesforce custom development and can answer any questions you may have on this or other issues you may be facing. 

In addition to introducing Max, I want to plug my stellar colleague Britzel Zuñiga’s upcoming NPSP webinar, Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack: Fundraising and donation management made easy with NPSP. Tune in if you are a new or current user of Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack. There is going to be a ton of great information shared during the presentation and demo.  

Finally, I am already looking forward to Dreamforce 2021, but in the meantime you can access the Dreamforce 2020 Resource Library, which is full of links to on-demand and live webinars, success stories and demos to get your creative juices flowing and get exposed to similar mission-driven organizations’ use of Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud. 

If you want to learn more about anything mentioned in this email, reply back and I can jump on the phone or connect you to a teammate. 

Jordan Berger, Senior Salesforce Consultant