NOTE: Starting with Spring ’12, the Self-Service portal isn’t available for new organizations. Existing organizations continue to have access to the Self-Service portal. What exactly is a Self-Service Portal (or SSP)? A Self-Service Portal is an authenticated website (requiring a Username and Password) to provide your constituents the ability to create and view Cases in your Salesforce.com instance as…
There are many “How To” or “Step-by-Step” tutorials spread throughout ShellBlack.com. This page simply consolidates these instructional pieces into one place. Hopefully these tutorials will help you explore some native areas of Salesforce.com that you may not have had an opportunity to check out – many of which are covered in the Salesforce.com Administrator Exam…
Web-to-Lead is a cool often overlooked native feature in Salesforce. It simply allows a way for you to create a Lead record in Salesforce from a form you publish on your website. You’ve seen the concept before on websites across the web – fill in some quick information such as First Name, Last Name, Company…
Go the extra mile – tweak the configuration for better Usability I’m a big stickler on configuring and training end users to use all the time savers that are available in Salesforce.com. Features like mail merge, email templates, Views, report links, Connect for Microsoft Outlook, etc. Teach them all the usability shortcuts available in Salesforce…
I recently had an email exchange with a Dallas User Group member who needed help getting her HTML emails to work. I find that most people get caught up on getting the images to render in the email. It takes a little bit of extra setup, but it’s not too hard. Here is the process….
At a Salesforce User’s Group meeting I heard a story about an Administrator that was brought in to manage a Salesforce.com org after the implementation was completed. What made this particular case interesting was that the partner that did the implementation created a lot of customization to replace many native functions – such as a…
Try to complete the majority of the setup and configuration on your Custom Object before creating your reporting. Frequently you will need to create custom Report Types to facilitate all the reporting requirements for your Custom Objects. The number of custom Report Types you might need to create will be dictated by the number of…
Pretty soon you can use Jigsaw (now Data.com) to keep your Contact data up-to-date, but there is a nice little and commonly overlooked native feature in Salesforce.com to keep the information on your Contacts current – it’s by sending a “Stay-in Touch Request.” First things first, you’ll need to check your settings for the feature under Setup…
How do you know who can see what records if your Organizational Wide Defaults are set to “Private for an Object? If the Object’s OWDs are set to “Private” then records for that object will have a “Sharing” button at the top of the record. If you click on that button you’ll see who can…
Enabling Sales Teams allows the Salespeople to quickly grant access to other who help them sell. In this example we have an Inside Sales Team comprised of a few Users. We don’t want to create a share based on a Role or a Public Group, but rather we’d like the ability for each Salesperson to…