Thursday, April 20, 2017

Coveo Free Edition Now Available for Salesforce

As a Sitecore MVP, I have used Coveo in my Sitecore projects as a simple way to get search up and running.  It is a powerful tool and you could start off with free edition and then upgrade to Pro and Enterprise to make use of additional features.

Now that it is available for Salesforce, I am definitely cheering and you should too.  There is no excuse now that the free edition is available.  Start out with the free edition, see the power and then as needed upgrade.

Check out this article for more information on Coveo free AI Powered search for Salesforce

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Changing Username and Password for Salesforce for Outlook Plug-In

This is possible however not in the most obvious place.  I would have expected the option to be in Microsoft Outlook however it is rather available by right-clicking on the tray icon in windows.

Once you click settings click on Change User
This will bring up the standard Salesforce login screen.  Login and then click allow to allow Outlook to use the Salesforce connection,

Friday, May 8, 2015

QuickStart: Creating a Custom Object

  1. Log into your sandbox or Developer organization.
  2. Click on Setup in the top right corner.
  3. Click Create => Objects
  4. Click New Custom Object.
  5. Enter Book for the label. Enter Books for the plural label. Click Save.
  6. Now let's create a custom field. 
  7. In the Custom Fields & Relationships section of the Book detail page, 
  8. click New. 
  9. Select Number for the data type and click Next. Enter Price for the field label. Enter 16 in the length text box. Enter 2 in the decimal places text box, and click Next. Click Next to accept the default values for field-level security. Click Save.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Salesforce Partner/Enterprise SOAP API QuickStart - Part 1: Setting Up Your WSDL

Using the Salesforce SOAP API in .NET is not straight forward there are a few quirks from the normal way you use SOAP.  You can either follow your way through some of my gotchas or you can bypass all that and use the Salesforce SOAP API QuickStart Module available by emailing me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

To obtain the enterprise SOAP API WSDL you need to log into Salesforce.com as the administrator.  Once you have done that you can scroll down and on the left hand side you will see the developer menu.  Click on it.

If it scrolled you to the top scroll down and note that the develop menu is now opened. Click on the API option.
There are a few APIs listed.  The Enterprise API is specific to your organization.  It can save you some time as it will know some things about your environment but most likely you want the Partner API as you can then share your code or modules with others who work for different organizations.  I will generate using the Partner API but the generation will be similar for Enterprise.

Once it generates you will see the an xml and get excited and rush off to take the Url and use it in Visual Studio as the WSDL.  Don't Rush off so soon as it will not work. You will get this error:

There was an error downloading 'https://na17.salesforce.com/soap/wsdl.jsp/_vti_bin/ListData.svc/$metadata'.
The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found.
Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'https://na17.salesforce.com/soap/wsdl.jsp'.
The content type text/html;charset=UTF-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. The first 597 bytes of the response were: '
The reason being that the WSDL is secured.  You can see it in the browser because you are logged into Salesforce.com however Visual Studio is NOT logged in.  To get around this.  Right Click on the page and click Save As

Save the WSDL on the file system in a place your Visual Studio Project can access it. Now in your Visual Studio Project choose Add Service Reference

Now in the reference box put the path to the xml file you saved for the WSDL then click Go.  Once You will see in the services box that the api has loaded

NOTE: If you are using .NET 2.0 then you may get an error in the WSDL related to the date fields. Thanks Alex for the information below:

There is a parsing issue when using .NET 2.0 with date time fields in salesforce, accessing through web services.
It seems to be a bug in .NET but there's another way to address it by manually editing the wsdl.
More information here:
http://community.salesforce.com/t5/NET-Development/Can-t-update-date-datetime-from-c-webservice-through-enterprise/m-p/96046
 Enter a namespace for your service and click OK

The next step is to download the Force.Com Cookbook. This will provide you with what you need to get started such as login/logout and searching.

If you have questions or would like a copy of the Salesforce SOAP API QuickStart Module email me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com This module is free to use the only thing I as is if you add new functionality to it or fix any issues in it that you send me the changes so I can share them with others using the module.


Thursday, April 9, 2015

SalesForce World Tour

There is a lot of buzz about the SalesForce World Tour #SalesForceTour on twitter as it is in Boston today.  There are a lot of good sessions and you will get to meet a lot of people currently working with Salesforce.

If you are in Toronto and have not registered please do at: Salesforce World Tour Toronto

Look forward to seeing you all there.

Contact Roles is not showing up on my Account Details page

Thanks Scott Jorgensen for the advice on Contact Roles :)

Contact Roles are very useful in a number of situations:


  1. You want to track companies a person used to work for. That way if you are looking for a contact at a company and cannot find them. You may be able to contact someone who used to work there and get a contact that way maybe even an introduction.
  2. You have people who work for a given company but sit on the a board or counsel or some other relationship.
  3. They could be a member of organizations like ToastMasters, or other organizations.
They are available out-of-the-box however are not displayed on the accounts page by default.  To add them to the accounts page you must do the following:  
  1. Log in as someone with access to edit the Account Layout.
  2. Navigate to an account details page.
  3. Click on Related Lists



  4. Drag and drop Contact Roles onto your layout

  5. Click Save

Now on your account details page you can add Contact Roles to your contacts.  If you need additional Contact Roles you can add them you by doing the following:

  1. Click Setup at the top right
  2. On the left column click on Customize -> Accounts -> Contact Roles

  3. Add your roles here.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the guild please email me at chris.williams@readwatchcreate.com

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

I just want to add a picture to my contacts

Why does it have to be so hard to add a picture of my contact to a contact details page?  I did a quick Google and found lots of crazy ideas such as using a RichText field and inserting the image there.

People have wanted a solution and discussed it on Salesforce Success in 2011

Others suggested coding solutions like this:

Display Photo in Content Details

There has to be a better way !!!  Salesforce would really love a Picture field we can add to contact details so we dont have to code to get it.  BTW Dynamics CRM already has this.