As a Button-Click Admin we can accomplish a lot- honestly. Probably more than we think. But sometimes we have to call in a Consultant to do the heavy lifting. In May of last year Tim McDonald did a wonderful post on “Working with a Consultant” , it really spelled out some of the fundamental points that an Admin needs to consider before working with an outsider. After a recent conversation with Jared Miller I realized there needed to be a part 2 to Tim’s post and what I would like to do is dive a little bit deeper into the next steps of working with a consultant and how to get both yourself, the organization, and your instance prepped to have the best possible experience while offering the Consultant perspective. I’ve always wanted to do a collaboration post in an interview-style post, so below is the result of my first collaboration

At some point in your career as a salesforce admin you’ll probably have the opportunity to merge salesforce orgs. As with any relationship, personal or business, the bringing together of disparate processes, data sets and system architecture can be exciting and daunting. My company recently went through the process of a salesforce org merge after an acquisition and the thought of bringing two companies customer data together felt overwhelming. I mean, maintaining one company’s salesforce org is a full time job right? Figuring out how to incorporate a 2nd company’s process and associated data all the while continuing to serve customers is a tall order right? Yes, it is a tall order. It’s a significant project regardless of the size of your orgs (remind yourself and your company’s leadership of this often…seriously). Thankfully there’s a great deal of good help available to aid you through the tactical details involved in

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 ButtonClickAdmin is proud to have a guest post by Matt Brown, Salesforce MVP and Salesforce Admin for Blackboard Inc. He is very active on the Salesforce Community Answers board, in fact I bet he’s at the top right now. So I consider him one of the go-to guys when I’m in a jam or need an answer and if you don’t follow him on twitter, I’d suggest doing that as well. Ok, enough of me take it away Matt! I am a Salesforce Admin for a company of about 600 users that engages in 3-6 acquisitions per year. This means the cleansing and migration of data, the mapping of fields, the installation of custom metadata components, the adjustment of any business processes and the setup of new users. These new acquisitions can require simple rip the band aid off migrations with no data and only training necessary while