Presented at Dreamforce 2015, Admin Theater

WHY would I stand in front of 200+ people, in the most stressful visible, high-traffic breakout area–the Admin Zone Theater at “The Largest Software Conference on Earth”–to share this presentation at Dreamforce 2015? Because so many people contribute, in so many ways, to freely sharing Salesforce build deets and best practices. SO many individuals willing to give a 30 minute phone call or a chat in the hallway to a nonprofit solo admin (which I was at the time) … so many people answering questions in the Success Community and Power of Us Hub… so many Twitter chats, freely-shared blog posts… the list is endless. Basically, the people of Force.com are good people.

So, in the spirit of being Good People, I shared this presentation at DF15. I will not lie, it was a … different… Dreamforce experience to be sure. Fairly high up there on the stress-o-meter. BUT. The goal was to dive into the AWESOME value custom objects play for a nonprofit/smaller/solo-admin org. They’re almost too easy to configure… like I could build, let’s say, one a minute if I tried. (And create spaghetti junction too, right?)

Unfortunately, Admin Zone sessions aren’t recorded. But I can share the deck, and I can tell you some of my favorite things

• That “awesome blue rectangle” referenced on slide 10–check it out and see what kind of a time saver it is. It’s surprising how many admins don’t know it’s there!
• Slide 11: it’s hard to give a presentation on custom object visibility and not basically say… “go to Trailhead and they will teach you everything about custom objects and it will be way more fun.”
• Same with Slide 12… go to Trailhead for all the good stuff on custom objects.
• Here’s my favorite Schema Builder “gotcha” and said so well by Trailhead:

Any field you add through Schema Builder isn’t automatically added to the page layout. You will need to edit the page layout to specify where the field should be displayed.

Check out the presentation deck here:

Custom Objects The Basics Tips and Tricks