Newsletter – Issue 4 – August 2020
Phew… What. A. Year.
A lot has happened since our last newsletter. An international pandemic, global protests over racial injustice, murder hornets— and it’s only August. As much as some part of us wants to go back to normal (when did kids jumping on the couch behind us on Zoom stop being funny?), we prefer to look at the positives. Perhaps nobody put it better than Leslie Dwight in her poem that went viral last month:
“What if 2020 is the year we’ve been waiting for? A year so uncomfortable, so painful, so scary, so raw — that it finally forces us to grow,” the poem reads. “A year that screams so loud, finally awakening us from our ignorant slumber. A year we finally accept the need for change. Declare change. Work for change. Become the change. […] 2020 isn’t cancelled, but rather the most important year of them all.”
So while we do miss our in-person office shenanigans, we don’t want to go back to normal. Because normal wasn’t working.
We have started long overdue conversations about how we as a company can better support our BIPOC clients and their allies. In order to address the inequalities in our own ecosystem, Metazoa is sponsoring a podcast that will allow for professionals to anonymously come forward and talk about their experiences with discrimination in the workplace.
In addition, our leadership is also taking an active role in Pep-Up Tech, both through mentorship and sponsorship. We will continue to support them as we look to expand our philanthropic efforts to empower BIPOC communities.
Of course, this is only the beginning. We will continue to educate ourselves on the inequalities and injustices people face every day, and we will strive to do better by them.
I hope you will join us in radically changing our community for the better. Let 2020 be the year you dare to change the world.
Jennifer Mercer- CEO
Upcoming Events
We are really excited to be involved in these upcoming events! Click on the links below to register for each!
Aug 13th – Des Moines Admin User Group
Aug 18th – Birmingham Alabama Admin User Group
Aug 20th – Evansville, IN Admin User Group
September 8th – Philly User Group
September 9th – 10th SaaS North
September 14th – Northeast Dreamin
September 30th – Oct 1st – Ascent Conference
Past Events
We have been heavily involved in virtual events. Although we miss everyone’s faces, it’s really nice to take part in events that have worldwide participation. Here are some to highlight:
May 5th – TIMIA Capital Webinar – Building your SaaS on Customer Cash with Jennifer Mercer
May 16th & 17th – Virtual Dreamin – Panel Session – Cutting Costs without Compromising Quality, Productivity, and Security with Jennifer Mercer, Leyna Hoffer, September Higham and panel moderator, Jill Hourani
May 20th – Indianapolis User group – Optimize Profiles and Tackle Technical Debt with Tom Appleton
June 15th – TrailheaDX Panel Session – Ask the Experts: How to be Successful with AppExchange with Jennifer Mercer
June 18th – Kansas City User Group – Optimize Profiles and Tackle Technical Debt with Tom Appleton
June 19th – AppXchange Hour – Use Case: How our Customer uses Snapshot to Manage Profiles and Permission Sets with Tom Appleton.
July 30th – Xplenty panel session with Bill Appleton
VIP Spotlight
Meet our VIP and friend, Shonnah Hughes. Besides being a Global Product Growth & Innovation Evangelist for GetFeedback, she is a Salesforce MVP, Salesforce Lightning Champion, Salesforce Trailblazers for the Future and Equality Award Winner. She has even signed the White House workforce pledge with Marc Benioff.
If you ask Shonnah Hughes for one interesting fact about her, she has a long list ready to go.
Meet Shonnah Hughes
She could tell you about her corn detasseling job when she was 13, or that her dream job is to be a fashion designer. She could talk about how one of her art pieces is a fixture in the community where she grew up, or about the time she was struck by lightning. But if you really want to know what makes Hughes unique, you have to go back to her roots in Minnesota.
Check out this Amazing New Feature!
User Connection Cleanup
Did you know that Inactive Users can still be connected to many important systems in your Salesforce Org? Now Snapshot’s new report, User Connection Cleanup, shows over 50 places that inactive users can be hiding. You can also clean up your Inactive Users with ease! The cleanup operation will replace inactive User Names, User Ids, and User Emails with an Active User that you select.
More New Features you Should Know About
At Metazoa, we are always striving to enhance Snapshot with new features and capabilities requested by our customers. Here are some recent new features and feature enhancements that you will love.
Major enhancement to assist large Orgs:
- Better asset grouping (chunking) capability to capture metadata for large Orgs
- Continuous Integration features expanded to automatically detect and use asset groups.
- Search Palette includes standard fields used across the Org
- Fuzzy search to include format variations for standard and custom fields
- Increased search formatting with sorting options to view and export search results
- Export to Excel with enhanced worksheets management to suit metadata analysis requirements
- Rewrote Apex Code Coverage and Apex Code Quality reports to handle large code deployments
Expanded Profile capture to include standard and undiscovered objects
Enhanced Profile merge to handle unknown permissions
Better deployment for Flows to handle latest and active versions
Multi-level Controlling vs Dependent fields to identify hierarchical fields and uncontrolled values
Renewed focus on Git flavors:
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- Connect through SSH
- Better branching and metadata restoration capabilities
Enhanced data migration
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- Better limits on child and “down the hierarchy” objects
- Enhanced handling of standard junction objects
- Improved polymorphic fields handling to assist Org migrations
- Upgraded Task data migrations to include archived records
- Handle Duplicate Rules and restricted picklists to be deactivated before data migration
Did You Know?
Snapshot has so many amazing features that we wanted to make sure you know about some of our fan favorites, so each quarter, we will highlight one or two features in the “Did you Know” section of our newsletter.
Did you know that you can get Snapshot to auto-add all your relevant Profile sections to your job list elements automatically?
In a typical scenario where you add metadata assets to your job list, after adding all the assets, you would spend a bunch of time to add relevant Object Permissions, Field Permissions, Record Type Visibility, Tab Visibility etc. This tedious work can be sped up using the “Add * Profiles” feature in the job list. Just right click on the job list after adding all your metadata assets and choose one of the “Add * Profiles” to automatically add all the relevant Profile section. The example below shows the “Add My Profile” add all the relevant pieces of the Admin profile for the Account object to the job list automatically.
Webinar Series: Snapshot for Awesome Admins – Path to a Clean and Secure Org
We are doing a webinar series where we will be focusing on cleaning and optimizing your Salesforce org. Click on the title links to RSVP. All of them will run at 10:00 a.m. pacific time.You don’t want to miss these informative webinars.
8/25/2020 – Managing Profiles and Permission Sets with Snapshot:
In this webinar, we will show you how you can use Snapshot to manage your profiles and permission sets and optimize your Salesforce security model. Topics include:
Documenting profiles and permission sets for administrator reference and compliance,
performing mass edits of profiles and permission sets to rapidly deploy security changes, visualizing security by user to tackle security issues, and automatically merging similar profiles and performing user assignments.
9/22/2020 – Eliminate technical debt and optimize your Salesforce Org with Snapshot:
In this webinar we will show you how you can use Snapshot to identify and eliminate technical debt and unused metadata from your Salesforce Orgs.Topics include: Using Snapshot reporting to identify any unused metadata in your Org including fields, groups roles, email templates, queues and more, and leveraging Snapshot’s deployment tools to rapidly delete unused metadata and save a backup for rollback or disaster recovery
10/13/2020 – Identify user related technical debt and optimize usage:
In this webinar, we will show you how you can use Snapshot to identify inactive users and their connections to your metadata and data. Topics include: Identify inactive users and their usage in your Org’s metadata – queues, email alerts, dashboards – causing unintended consequences, and leveraging Snapshot to manage/ replace/ delete these unexpected connections to achieve better data integrity and security
11/3/2020 – Migrating related data between Salesforce Orgs with Snapshot:
In this webinar, we will show you how you can use Snapshot to migrate data while maintaining complex relationships across and within objects. Topics include:
Identify relationships across multiple objects to build and download complex hierarchical datasets, migrate data and retain data relationships within and across objects, scramble sensitive fields to satisfy compliance data requirements, and remap objects and fields to assist Org migration needs.
12/1/2020 – Leveraging Snapshot’s User Stories to manage your Salesforce Org:
In this webinar, we will show you how you can use Snapshot to manage tasks and resources throughout your application development lifecycle using Snapshot’s User Stories feature-set. Topics include:
Defining sprints, user stories and tasks, identify development collisions and merge/ resolve conflicts, and deploy a cohesive deployment package with full and partial rollback capabilities.
Content you Don’t Want to Miss
Trailblazing Entrepreneurs to Know
How They Scaled Their Businesses to Success in the Salesforce ecosystem
Cutting Costs Without Compromising Quality, Productivity and Security
VIP Spotlight – Meet Shonnah Hughes
What’s Happening at Metazoa?
We are thrilled to introduce you to a couple of new faces. Maila Ruggiero started with us in May as our Event Marketing Intern. Maila is a college student at California Polytechnic State University. Anjana Melvin started with us in July as our Content Marketing Associate. Ironically, Anjana recently graduated from California Polytechnic State University. We also had a role change. We are super excited to have Shacarria Scott move into the role of Customer Success Representative.
Maila Ruggiero
Anjana Melvin
Shacarria Scott
Congratulations! 