Getting Started With Communities

Communities is becoming a necessity to manage customers and partners and why not, it's easy that way isn't it? We (at Briskminds) are currently handling around 10 active projects where we need to implement the communities, but of-course we were also new to it few months back.

We've followed some simple steps to enable and use it, and would like to share that with my fellow community members as well. Let's explore more how we can enable and customize our community.

How to enable communities

1. Go to Setup > App Setup > Customize > Communities > Settings
2. Enable the checkbox "Enable communities"

Register For Domain

Once enabled the communities it will ask for the domain name, show in picture. Once registered for the domain you can now create your community, by clicking on “New Community” (Customize | Communities | Manage Communities, then click New Community) button.

Allowing profile to login in community

1. Once you create new community then click on edit.
2. It will show the screen as displayed in picture (please remember this, as we will refer the same Edit again and again)

1. Click on “Members” tab
2. Once clicked on “Members” tab, it will show the screen as displayed in picture

1. Here you can enable profiles and give permissions to users
2. If you are creating a community user then make sure profile assigned to that user is listed here (in “Selected Profile”) else user will not be able to do anything with the email which will be received after new user creation.

Allowing Tabs and Pages

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Tabs and Pages”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. Select “Use Salesforce.com tabs” (let’s not dive into using site.com as it is a separate topic)
2. Then you can select the tabs which you want to show to the community users
3. Note – First tab selected will be the landing tab

Custom Branding

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Branding”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. From here you can customize your headers and footers (formats are mentioned in picture) (which will be displayed on the native screens, and depends if you’ve applied on custom pages/tabs) and color theme to the community

Customize Login Page

1. Click on “Edit” against your community
2. Now click on “Login Page”, it will show the screen displayed in picture

1. Now you can give your company logo in login page. Whenever user open your community link, then you can show your company logo in header and show your content in footer.
2. If you need to completely change the login page to your visualforce page then we need to follow some more steps mentioned below :

(i) Create an apex class and visualforce page you want to show as your login page. Keep it simple for now.

Apex Class :

global with sharing class CustomLoginController 
{
  global String username {get; set;}
  global String password {get; set;}
  global CustomLoginController () {}
  
  global PageReference login() 
{
  return Site.login(username, password, null); 
  } 
}

Visualforce Page (please change this according to your need) :

Login to Community



Username


Password






Forgot your password? | Join our Community


Powered by Cloudcatamaran

(ii) Now go toSetup>Customize>Communities>Manage Comunities and click on force.com link as shown below

(iii) Now scroll down and click on edit "Site Visualforce Pages"

(iv) Now add the custom page you just created to "Enabled Visualforce Pages"

(v) Once saved, click on Edit as shown below :

(vi) Now add “CustomLogin” page as shown below. And save it.

(vii) Now click on "URL Redirect" as shown below :

(viii) Now add partial source URL (Ex. /support/login ) in Source URL textbox and partial target URL in (Ex. /support/CustomLogin) in Target URL textbox and click save.

Create New User

1. Create a new account (Go to your org as internal user and then click on account tab and then new)
2. Create a new contact record under newly created account (Go to the newly create account and then click on new on contact related list)
3. Open contact record and click on “Manage External User” button (as shown in picture) and then click on “Enable Customer User” link, it will redirect you to user record

   4. When you click on Save button (on new user screen), please ensure that the current logged in user should have a role to create this new user otherwise it will give you error.

Publish It

Once you are done with everything and ready to use your community then you will click on publish as shown in picture

(From Setup, click Customize > Communities > Manage Communities. Click on edit button in the front of your community and then click on Publish button.)

Now you are all set to go. Get started with this hot topic, and please do share your thoughts or problem you may face.

Lightning Cheat Sheet - Level Basic

A very basic and overview which can solve your initial queries :

What is the Lightning Component Framework?

-> The Lightning Component framework is a UI framework for developing dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices.

-> It uses JavaScript on the client side and Apex on the server side.

Framework

-> The aura namespace contains components to simplify your app logic, and the ui namespace contains components for user interface elements like buttons and input fields

Visualforce and Lightning Comparison

-> Lightning components are client-side focused, making them more dynamic and mobile

friendly.

-> Visualforce components are page-centric and rely heavily on server calls.

-> Lightning components use Apex on the server side, organizations that can’t use Apex code can’t create Lightning components, but they can use Visualforce

Benefits 

-> You don't have to spend your time optimizing your apps for different devices as the components take care of that for you.

-> Uses a stateful client and stateless server architecture that relies on JavaScript on the client side to manage UI component metadata and application data.

-> The framework uses JSON to exchange data between the server and the client.

Lightning Component?

-> Components are the self-contained and reusable units of an app.

-> A component can contain other components, as well as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any other Web-enabled code.

Tools

-> You can use Developer Console to build lightning apps and components

Aura and Lightning?

-> Lightning components are based on the open source Aura framework available at https://github.com/forcedotcom/aura.

-> The Aura framework enables you to build apps completely independent of your data in Salesforce.

Many more to come to get you started with lightning, stay tuned.

Cheers!!

Trailhead - Navigate the Salesforce Advantage

I think most of you (probably all) are aware of TRAILHEAD!! An awesome tool design by a great team of Salesforce to help new and experience developers. It helped me a lot to get over lightning concepts and I hope you must have your own favorite list.

For everyone who is getting started with Salesforce or planning to get started have a very common question what is Salesforce? Why we should start working on Salesforce? These are the points which were (YES! were) missing from Trailhead. Again thanks to Trailhead which Salesforce recently launched which is all about this. 

Due to this one can easily get better understanding of Salesforce and will sort out many puzzles which may be running from a long time in mind. As we are all aware that how easy is to use trailhead, so these new modules just add "Cherry on the Cake". In these modules you will find information related to every aspect of Salesforce whether it is their Service, Security or their core values. Now it is easy for me to train newbies who joins my company as fresher. It tool a lot of initial headache and made my life easy. Am pretty sure it will not take much time even if anyone who doesn't know about Salesforce goes through it.

Best part is the security, which is a big concern now a days (even from long). Salesforce has a lot of security protocols which ensures safety of your data. I think if I remember correctly not even Salesforce internal members can see your data until you authorize them to do so. Would like to add one more point here, that there is a link to create free developer account and more details about different modules including the newly added IOT cloud.

Reference: https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead/trail/salesforce_advantage

Happy Trailhead!

How to Whitelist All IPs in Salesforce

I saw this on many developer forums and stack exchange and many others are facing the same issue of how we can enable of all IPs in our organization. For developers this a big problem, as every-time you share the credentials with anyone you've to whitelist their IP so they can login without sending any security code to emails.

So here is sweet and short solution to it. You simply need to create a home page component (custom link) and use this code there :

var startingPoint = 0; 
var endpoint = 0; 

openPage(); 
function openPage() 
{ 
endpoint = startingPoint + 1; 
var win = window.open('https://ap2.salesforce.com/05G/e?IpStartAddress=' + startingPoint + '.0.0.0&IpEndAddress=' + endpoint + '.255.255.255&isdtp=vw',600,600); 
win.onload = function() 
{ 
win.document.getElementsByName('save')[0].click(); 
win.onunload = function() 
{ 
win.close(); 
startingPoint = startingPoint + 2; 
if(startingPoint <= 255) 
{ 
openPage(); 
} 
} 
} 
}

On home page layout you've to use this custom link. Make sure your browser is allowing the pop-ups as once you click on this link just sit back and relax as it will continuously calls the page and add IPs to your org.

Also in code I've "https://ap2.salesforce.com", please make sure you change it your base URL of the ORG (rest URL remain as is "/05G/e?IpStartAddress=' + startingPoint + '.0.0.0&IpEndAddress=' + endpoint + '.255.255.255&isdtp=vw',600,600")

Hope this helps. Cheers!!

Briskminds - Product Development Outsourcing (PDO) Partners - Salesforce

Briskminds is PDO partners with Salesforce. What does PDO means? Salesforce has a program running with the name Product Development Outsourcing Partners which is independent from any other partner program.

Salesforce is more focused on customer success than any other thing, and to live up the expectation it's very important that their customers are not facing any issues in using Salesforce. Also if customers are looking for a product to be developed without having any intentions to hire a team then there must be a support system in place which can help them developing a product along with implementation and support. Here comes PDO partners, who help the eco-system adopt Salesforce.

There are around 20 PDO partners globally. Briskminds is engaged in this program from March 2015 and since then involved in multiple engagements. We've been working on several AppExcahnge listings which are about to go live soon and also giving support to multiple ISVs and SI partners for their existing implementations.

So what you'll get if you engage with a PDO partner :

1) Reliability on Intellectual Property side

2) No extra burden to manage a team

3) Deliveries on time

4) Verified source of engagement

Why you should get engaged with Briskminds?

1) Our team has Salesforce MVP and certified Developers/Admins

2) Dedicated resources for each customer so they always feel special

3) Very competitive prices compared to market

4) Flexible in following any process which make customer comfortable

5) Experts in domains like E-Commerce,Real Estate,Communities

6) Integration experts

7) To an extend work on customer's timings, so there is less time lag and more collaboration

8) We know the end to end process of building an app and take it to AppExchange

9) Good exposure to new features like Salesforce1, Lightning

So if you are running on another domain and want to switch to Salesforce feel free to get in touch with us. We will help you out with development as well as integration with your old domain to Salesforce.

Email : ankit@briskminds.com OR info@briskminds.com

Cheers!!

Summer Of Trailhead - Jaipur Salesforce Developer Group

We've recently hosted an event which is organized by Salesforce globally and it was all about "Trailhead". First of all thank you so much everyone who attended the meeting and make it a big success. This time we've received maximum number of attendees ever in Jaipur DUG history. Yes! over 90 people attended and with full enthusiasm.

Those who were not able to attend here is the glance of what you've missed.

At the beginning we've organized a hands-on session on Trailhead where Gaurav Kheterpal explained how to get started and then all were supposed to complete one full trail.

Trust me many of them have done that in 15-20 mins.

It was time to award them :-)

After that Durgesh Dhoot done a fantastic job by demoing some awesome tools on SF which is very helpful to every developer. Here is the slidedeck from where you can get the links and take benefit out of it.

Followed by Abhinav Gupta who shared his experience using trailhead. It's not only for the developers to get started, but also helpful for the companies who are recruiting freshers and Trailhead can be used in interview process as well.

It was really a second perspective of looking at trailhead.

We then ended up having lunch along with beer :-)

Now we are again organizing an event where Salesforce is going to reveal something big, for which we are all waiting for. If you want to join us please click her and register yourself. It will be more awesome as it a late night event.

Stay tuned here for more updates on user group.

Girly Geeks - India

It's time to have geeky girls from India to show their skills and become a part of an awesome community. Women are growing their footprints in technology then why not get that effort be recognized globally?

Are you a Salesforce admin or force.com expert? Then give us a chance to help you be involved in the community where we want some awesome people like you.


What is Girly Geeks?

The Girly Geeks were founded in 2010 by of Geraldine Gray, Principal at Endiem and Salesforce MVP, when she recognized that women attending Dreamforce needed a way to connect with other female attendees. Over 30 Girly Geeks chapters have formed around the world but there is none in India. Surprised?

The groups have become a place to find career advice, job opportunities, Salesforce tips, and friendship throughout the year. We call then #SuperGirls #SuperAdmins #WomenInPower

Why did you join Girly Geeks?

-> Female Leadership
-> Seeking & Cultivating – Professional Development
-> Diverse skillsets to learn from
-> Shared job opportunities
-> Networking opportunities – Mentorship
-> Career
-> Coaching


Other Benefits

-> Meet Salesforce Experts & Industry Leaders
-> Professional Development
-> Career Opportunities
-> Certifications
-> Mentoring


What Should YOU do to Get Involved with Girly Geeks!

We can help you start your own chapter in India, if you are interested then reach out to us at ankit.salesforce@gmail.com and I'll connect you to the concerned person.

Really looking forward to it!