Optimize Your Workflow: 5 Essential Tools in Our Salesforce Toolkit

Salesforce offers a great amount of customization and design possibilities, but, admittedly, some of these features can get pretty tedious when they make up a big part of your daily work. That’s where third party tools come in handy.

Some of our favorite tools are:

1. DLRS
2. Assignment Plugin
3. Click Deploy
4. XL Connector
5. Salesforce Toolkit              

Declaritive Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS)

Have you ever needed to have a count of how many Orders an Account has, or maybe a count of Activities, only to find, while setting up your standard Salesforce rollup field, that these objects are unavailable to be rolled up? That’s where Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries come into play.  Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries, abbreviated as DLRS, allow us to easily create rollup summary fields in instances where standard Salesforce functionality will not allow them. As of now, Salesforce out of the box only allows rollups when there is a master-detail relationship between two objects. DLRS vastly expands this functionality by allowing rollups between any two objects where there is just a simple lookup field.

While the interface can be a bit daunting at first, it becomes second hand in no time, and will quickly become one of your go-to Salesforce tools.

To view more about DLRS, you can visit its github site which holds all the information you’ll need to get started.

To install DLRS on your own org, click here.

And of course, be sure to check out our guide for creating your own DLRS.

Assignment Plugin for Re-Running Salesforce Assignment Rules

The Assignment Plugin by GearsDesign makes it easy to re-run your assignment rules at the exact moment you need them. While existing Salesforce functionality does allow for assignment rules to be re-run when records are edited, this can sometimes lead to unintended assignments on unrelated record edits.

The Assignment Plugin allows you to call a custom Apex Class from process builder or flow and let them handle re-running the assignment of Leads and Cases. Because you set your own criteria, you can decide the exact moment when records should be reassigned and when they shouldn’t. This can be a huge saving point when certain records meet your assignment rule criteria, but they should not be reassigned just yet. You can also choose whether or not any email messages should be triggered when the action runs. For these reasons, the Assignment Plugin is a great tool to have up your sleeve.

To learn more about the Assignment Plugin, check out their AppExchange listing.

Click Deploy

If you’ve done even one large Salesforce deployment before, then you know how quickly the standard change set interface can become frustrating. It can be slow and tiresome getting all of your components added to the change set. Luckily, there’s Click Deploy.

Click Deploy is a web application that allows you to easily and seamlessly get all of your change set components ready for deployment into your production environment. All it takes to get Click Deploy running is linking your sandbox org and your production org, which takes less than a minute. One of the most useful features of Click Deploy is its ability to instantly compare any component between your sandbox and production orgs. It will display if there have been any changes to the component and, if so, what those changes are. Finally, when your change set is finished you can both validate and deploy it directly from the Click Deploy interface. It also keeps a log of all your past deployments so you can always see what was deployed and when.

If you do deployments of any kind, and you feel that Salesforce’s standard change set manager is a little stuck in the past, then head on over to Click Deploy and try it out!

XL Connector

The XL Connector by Xappex will completely change the way you do any kind of data manipulations for Salesforce. It seamlessly connects with Microsoft Excel and is accessed through the ribbon bar at the top of the spreadsheet. Unlike data loader, XL Connector allows you to query Salesforce data, insert, update, and delete records directly from your spreadsheet. It even displays success or error messages directly in your spreadsheet after you run any kind of insert or update, allowing you to quickly understand and make any changes to your data. You can also run reports, run duplicate record merges, and update picklists directly in your spreadsheet. Once you use XL Connector, you’ll never think of handling your Salesforce data any other way.

To learn more about XL Connector, visit the Xappex website.

Salesforce Toolkit

The Salesforce Toolkit web application is a handy tool to have at your disposal. With a wide variety of functions that you can perform, the Salesforce Toolkit can greatly reduce the time spent on your Salesforce org operations. It allows org configuration or data comparisons, health checks, and other tools designed to make your job that much easier. One of the most useful in daily administrator functions is the field creator. Here, you can mass create all of your fields for an object at the same time. Any settings that you can configure on field creation in Salesforce can be set right in the field creator, even the field visibility! This tool is definitely one to keep in mind.

You can access the Salesforce Toolkit here.

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