I want to introduce a term to you called “feature creep” I read about it in terms of technology and TV remotes. Take a look at the picture- AppleTV remote v. DirecTV remote. 3 versus a million (44- I actually counted). In my mind this is the epitome of “Thinking Different”. Now much as I have wanted to work another Steve Jobs picture into a post, I think this has real value for Button-Click Admins. They Think Differently They- is your users- and they do think differently. They see things differently than you do. I think back to a post by Kevin O’hara on Field Hoarding which is in line with a request I received lately to add “15 checkboxes to an Account page”. Yeah, I’ll just let you chew on that one for a second. But it reminds me that users see the interface differently than Admins. As Admins we should try

Usually the email or phone call starts off something like this: “I clicked on this [insert link, Account, etc. here] and I’m getting this error ‘Insufficient Privileges’- I know I should be able to see this and I need you to fix this NOW!” Alright. So you probably know the error all to well. A user- for some reason- can’t access what they think they should and Salesforce is giving them an error. This was a daily occurrence for me when I moved my organization from a completely read/ write organizational setting to a read only. At first, it was painful for some users. I guess they were like stallions who were used to roaming the open range- but then the evil Admin Mike put a fence around them. Truth be told, the fence was for their safety- to protect them from changing valuable data. But of course the user may not

In case you haven’t noticed I’m special. Not just me, but you are as well. As a Salesforce Admin you have to be special because you are the first one called on if there is a problem. Let’s take a simple problem, but one I run into more often than not- like data being populated in a field and troubleshooting the reason for a user. Often this problem requires me to see all of the fields related to a particular object. The Administrator view As a best practice I set up at least one page layout for every object that shows me (the Salesforce Administrator) all of the fields. This ensures that when I view an Account, Contact, or another object I can see everything possible to help trouble-shoot something for a user. But I use this for more than just trouble shooting, this is also great for reporting and

This week I am very happy to have Jenna Baze (@RatherGeeky) guest post for me on the Monday AM Admin series. She has a lot to share with us Button-click Admins, so take good notes and be sure to follow her on twitter. – Maybe it’s the girly side of me, but I like pretty things. And the truth is that sometimes data can be boring. Sure, we’ve got attractive dashboards and a new clean user interface, but I yearn for more. So, as a Button-Click-Admin intrigued by code-y things, I’d like to share a few pieces of ‘eye candy’ that I’ve customized for our Salesforce org. Account Sales Google Chart After attending a Salesforce ‘Tips and Tricks’ webinar, I decided to take a stab at leveraging the Google Charts API to add a neat visual to my standard Account layout. In addition to being a nice pop of color