Polytech Software is a Silver Salesforce Partner in Ukraine and top service provider to the Salesforce community. Our dedicated Salesforce-certified Engineers specialize in helping our clients to realize meaningful business improvements achieved by using the Salesforce products. Extensive experience in Salesforce app development, configuration, and integration of Salesforce orgs make the best possible matches for our clients.
Our professionals assist clients in avoiding common mistakes, advise, and recommend the most efficient and advantageous solutions based on the Salesforce platform. We noticed that even though Salesforce is not something totally new, almost every single Salesforce Empire neophyte has similar questions in his mind:
“How hard it is to set up a Salesforce organization? Is it entirely in our power or it’s better to hire someone instead? Do my company has to work with Salesforce Partners only? Who will help us to manage our day-to-day tasks in an emergency case?”
These are rather difficult and multi-layered questions to answer, and I’m just trying here to share my thoughts. There is nothing complicated in Salesforce learning. Any brainiac will master this platform in a matter of days. Moreover, in several weeks, you may already have an expert (you can even get him certified). I know you may be doubtful about that, but still… Sure thing, you have someone dealing with IT infrastructure administration. Please, show him this Salesforce learning platform, and I’m sure that in a week or so he will crack 90 percent of your problems. Did he fail? Is this the skepticism or insufficient motivation? If so, show him this infographic. However, you’d better not do that or you will either promote him or look for a new administrator.
Salesforce is simple-to-learn, has excellent training paths, and in most cases provides means for organization support on your own. But if you choose to set up a Salesforce organization “from scratch” – you will face another situation. You may deal with it by yourself likewise, but I don’t advise you to do that. You see, initial setup and configuration of Salesforce need much more expertise and experience working with the platform compared to its support. The settings alone may seem to be very simple, but one has to know how to customize them and what value sets to assign. I’ll give you an example: one company did not turn to Salesforce implementation professional and configured all the settings by itself. Even though it was impressive at first glance, a grave mistake in terms of security was made. There was a single mistake only, but it was fatal. All the reports at this company were deployed on behalf of the CEO role (the highest access level), but any user could obtain the report data. The worst part is that it was allowed to export the report data. End of the story. Keep on reading, if you have missed the idea. Superficially it seemed to be great, and ordinary users saw no reports intended for top executives. However, they could create, execute, and export them.
In other words, any user having guest access level could generate a report containing all of the data on the company’s customers, leads, transactions. Moreover, he could export it to his laptop! That’s how the administrator has customized the report generation, having forgotten to uncheck two checkboxes in the settings. The conclusion is as follows: I believe that official Salesforce Partners or at least certified professionals shall perform the initial setup and configuration of Salesforce organization.
However, this is not the case when Salesforce is put in place of an outdated system or instead of the system falling short of customer’s needs. It is the most challenging scenario, and special attention is to be paid. In this case, it won’t work out if Salesforce Partner (or even Salesforce itself) does not help you! Even so, make sure that the Partner you are up to work with devotes his attention to issues as follows:
- On frequent occasions, currently available system that is to be replaced, contains a tremendous amount of settings and modules. Avoid the situation when the Partner tries to habitually and thoughtlessly migrate all the settings and customization to the Salesforce. Indeed, the system replacement is an excellent opportunity to reconsider all your time-honored business processes and to switch to the Salesforce’s best practices. Nevertheless, any decent system is being developed with the fewest possible alterations.
- Be sure that interoperability includes actual data volumes integration testing. It is of prime importance! I have seen how tailor-made projects collapsed just because they could not process the actual data volume. The reason is that Salesforce is a cloud service able to handle any data volume and has never had any performance issues. This is achieved by some Governor Limits, i.e., restrictions on user requests. On the one hand, this ensures the set performance level, on the other — claims developer’s attention, especially when integrating.
- Salesforce data model map has to be developed for the data model system you currently possess at the very commencement of work. Otherwise, the cost and duration of data mapping to be unloaded will skyrocket to the Moon. I therefore strongly encourage you to steer clear from “professionals” swearing they will smoothly migrate the data. This process has always been and remains challenging and too efforts-consuming from both the integrator and you.
To sum up:
- A certified Salesforce Partner shall deal with the implementation.
- In a complicated case, when the existing system is to be replaced, you have to make a conscious choice of the contractor. Avoid obtaining yet another unique (costly to support) system. You contractor shall also manage Governor Limits problems and be aware of data migration procedure.
- System support, especially for small-sized companies, may always be done with your resources. In extreme cases, you may ask the Partner to train your staff. Polytech Software, in turn, does train the technical crew and users of our customers.
In case you have any Salesforce problems or if you are just wondering why Salesforce is the most robust CRM platform, feel free to email the Salesforce Silver Partner at [email protected] or proceed to our website.
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Written by: Mr. Rustam Nurgudin, Salesforce Trailblazer.
Rustam built a team of Salesforce developers which is great to work with; the guys are great programmers and admins, posses hundreds of certificates confirming their expertise in Salesforce, and built The Welkin Suite, an IDE well known in the Salesforce development community which speeds up the coding process on Salesforce platform and makes it as convenient as using Visual Studio.
