Where Salesforce Devs go for Support

Salesforce recently undertook a branding exercise to pull together their mobile offerings, products and services, and the output was App Cloud Mobile. As well as this being the first time I’ve really seen a joined-up messages from Salesforce around the why and when one might deviate from Salesforce1, when undertaking a mobilisation of apps, it also triggered something in me that led me to seek an answer to a question that I’ve had for some time… where do Salesforce developers go for support, as their first port of a call?

Ports in a Storm

stackexchange

As a developer, and without causing much judgement upon me, it’s safe to say I frequent StackOverflow and other StackExchange communities a fair amount when looking to solve issues in my job. It’s an incredible source of information (and opinion), and its gigantic community there’s an excellent chance that at least one other person has run into the same scenario you’re hoping to resolve… that’s not to say you never go to find just one post on a problem, and find that you were the author, and posted it two years prior. There is a dedicated Salesforce community available (22k users, 47k questions – at the time of writing), and it’s generally pretty active.

Why do most posts here have zero replies?
– Joseph Nardone, Salesforce Dev Forum

The Salesforce Developer Forums  are not new, though to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever really used them. It was a mention of these forums on the developer page for the new App Cloud Mobile that got me thinking about why do Salesforce not point folk to Stackoverflow instead, and in fact reminded me of one of the posts I’d spotted some time ago.

why-do-most-questions-have-zero-replies

Now this one might surprise some of you… but there’s a Google+ Community for the Salesforce Mobile SDK, that appears to the most “formal” place to go if you’ve got questions about building custom mobile apps for Salesforce. This is where the internal team post interesting info (release notes, etc). The community (including some of us at MobileCaddy) do reply to posts here, though in all honesty I don’t check it nearly as often as some of the other channels, and I believe this is the same for other users too.

And the Results are in

I posted up a twitter poll and asked folk to vote on their #1 place to go for support, when it comes to Salesforce development, and used the hashtag #askforce to help get responses – how on Earth I didn’t include #askforce as one of the options is a mystery even to me. I was humbled by the response rate and retweets, and for this I’m truly grateful to the community.

tweet-screenshot

As well as the results captured in the poll I also received 11 tweets backing the hashtag #askforce and 7 for “Google”. Having “Google” as an answer is, in my view, an odd one… I tend to think that if I’m to include it then I should also include “The Internet” and “Laptop” as entries. During the write up of this post I was wondering about whether to run another poll, to include “#askforce” and how many more votes the inclusion would likely prompt. Along with this I would think that, with the open source projects Salesforce now manages, that “github” too would be a viable choice.

During a recent Salesforce webinar I asked the chair why Salesforce had multiple channels for support, and whether or not there should be a “preferred” one. I was told that they’d be happy to hear what us developers thought, and would be happy to take that into account. And so this is my next step, to pass on these results. I shall also include a personal plea that the G+ community for the Mobile SDK project is closed, and set on fire, and then the ashes are sent to space… or perhaps just posted on the Salesforce Developer Forums.


New Trailhead Badge – Trailhead Builder for ISVs?

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to lose any friends, or make any waves, if I come out and say Trailhead is awesome… so…

TRAILHEAD IS AWESOME!
– Todd Halfpenny, Mobile Technical Architect, 2016

And as a dev – and all round tech lover – interested in Salesforce, I absolutely love the accessibility to information and training. And that’s not to mention the the broadness of topics it covers, from Apex development, to generating reports, to promoting diversity within your organisation.

And with my ISV Hat on?

Of course, it’s good for us, in terms of upskilling our employees and in general giving access to superb resources for all future staff. But, and I’m just going to come out and say it, I want more.

Imagine this, a Trailhead Builder for ISVs (in fact wouldn’t it be great to earn your Trailhead Builder for ISVs Trailhead badge).

Trailhead Builder for ISVs badge

That’s right, wouldn’t it be great if you were, say, employed at Ebsta and you had a tool to create a Getting Started with Ebsta trail and have trails such as Creating Your First Templates. How fantastic would it be if you could submit a config file that described a set of objects and properties to be evaluated, which could be used to do the brilliant automated marking that Trailhead does when it connects to your dev org?

I know for sure that our customers would appreciate some MobileCaddy badges, either for admins or devs. I can really see how valuable a badge for Defining Your First Fully Offline Mobile Table could be to our clients, be they part of an end user org or a MobileCaddy Partner. It’s all well and good having our own training resources, but if we could offer an interactive, online pool of information and tests, that aligned to those they are likely to be familiar with, then it can only be positive.

Such trails become even more important, I believe, when ISVs are faced with not just upgrading their apps to be Lightning-compliant, but also having to update their training materials, courses and documentation, too.

I can only imagine that such tools or processes exist internally, and hope that this post my tweak some interest and ignite some excitement over such feature set being available for ISVs.


London Salesforce Admin Meetup – August Review

Now this might sound surprising, but prior to last night I hadn’t been to any of the Awesome Admin meetups before. I’ve seen admin talks and pretensions at conferences and the like, but I had not actually attended an AUG (Admin User Group) before.

And so I can’t comment on other AUGs, but London’s is excellent. We were 70+ strong, were hosted by PWC, and were treated to a handful of really interesting, (entertaining?) and informative talks.

The event was very friendly, and although I knew a handful of folk from other Salesforce meetups and community events, I met a whole raft of other folk too.

View of London Bridge from outside the meetup

The venue is in an incredible location, and plenty of attendees took a pic of the vista on exiting – including me. Pizza, beer, wine and soft drinks, and all went down well. The only negatives on the venue, from me anyway, were a lack of seating and the room being too hot. Of course, being British I just smiled and took it on the chin. I’m sure if I mentioned either of these things then they could have been addressed.

Four talks were lined up for the evening, so let’s crack on.

Salesforce Security – Francis Pindar

As an avid member of the community, Francis, a Salesforce MVP, was expected to deliver a good talk, and that he did. Squeezing an awful lot of content into a relatively short amount of time.

His talk was all around security, and things to look out for, including steps that can be taken to increase your security – both personally speaking, and also in the realm of a Salesforce Admin. He started off with a quite dramatic big number, 487 million. This was the number of private records that were leaked into the public domain last year.

Next came something that caught me out completely… audience participation! This is something I’ve not seen at the DUGs. It became clear that Admins are indeed a different breed. Francis ran us through a couple of hypothetical scenarios, highlighting some of the tactics used, and how we can protect ourselves. During the conversations it actually transpired that two folk, just in my group of eight, had been victims of a phishing attack, just in the last week. These threats are real.

Education is key to prevention

One of the key points that came out of the talk was that even though Salesforce provides a lot of out-the-box security (and settings that can be used to lock your org down even further), that actually users of the system can pose just as much as a threat, and are a common way in which systems are compromised. Off the back of this came a nice summary statement, “education is key to prevention”, to which Francis nicely parried with the recommendation of this free course on security, so why not check it out and pass around to your colleagues too.

Intro to Health Cloud – Chris Edwards

health cloud promo image

As a ‘face’ of the Salesforce community, but one I’d not actually heard speak before, I was keen to see what Chris, of Mavens, had to say on the new Health Cloud. This is one of Salesforce’s newest clouds and is built upon the Service Cloud. It has pre-built targeted custom objects that (should) fit to organisations within the healthcare industry.

 

Chris gave us a demo and showed us some of the features, and current niggles, that the Health Cloud provides. In all it looks good, and this was one of Chris’s key points – it does look good but sadly is a bit lacking under the hood (at the moment at least). Health Cloud is all currently Lightning-powered through Lightning Out in standard Visualforce, and with that comes the current hit to performance that Lightning is presently suffering.

Intro to Financial Services Cloud – Jodi Wagner, David Everitt

The tag team of Jodi and David were up next, both from Accenture. They gave us an overview of another new cloud from Salesforce, the Financial Services Cloud. As with the Health Cloud this is built upon one of the existing offerings, though this time it’s the Sales Cloud that is used as a foundation. The Financial Services Cloud is built for wealth management and is currently in its first iteration.

The view on this offering, from Jodi and David at least, is that it’s not a bad first stab. Like the Health Cloud though, there’s still more to be done, and what is there isn’t really available to be configured or modified to a point that it’ll be useful beyond some of the very basic use cases.

The idea behind both these clouds is to give organisations within certain fields a good starting point and something to build upon. It looks like Salesforce have made a good start, but there’s still a lot that can be improved upon.

Capturing Requirements – Amanda Beard-Neilson

As with the other speakers, Amanda is also active within the community. This was a chance for me to catch a talk similar to the great one she did at London’s Calling that I had missed at the time.

It was an entertaining presentation for sure, and I’m pretty sure I can’t do it justice here. But worry not, check out this video from said London’s Calling.

The talk was captivating and covered many points. The majority seemed to be common sense, but actually get lost when in the process of trying to gather requirements. This led to me thinking that maybe just one key thing needs to be remembered… focus.

During several of our recent projects at MobileCaddy – including an award-winning one with our strategic partner Appirio – we’ve seen how having a sturdy and focused requirements gathering stage can hugely affect a project, for the better. As well as the process, there’s as much a human aspect to this. Having a good relationship with the client, one where mutual respect is in place, leads to better results. Projects will not just actually deliver better outputs, they’ll also run smoother, be quicker, and ultimately provide better value.

Agile Software Requirements
I love the above image, but could not find anyone to attribute it to, sorry.

Wrap up

I’m really pleased I branched out from the safety of the DUGs to attend my first Awesome Admin meet. It was certainly different and actually very interesting to hear about Salesforce from different angles than those that I’m used to.

Useful Links


Why Ionic is Ideal for Enterprise

ionic-formular

Let’s start with a couple of facts;

university
  1. I am – and the rest of the folk at MobileCaddy are, too – massive fans of Ionic. We’ve been using their tools and loving their work since early beta, and the incredible team there (and their community) just keep turning out more and more amazing stuff.
  2. I’ve never had training to use software, or websites. Whether for the desktop or mobile, these things are usually very straightforward to use.
  3. I’m a liar – Of course I’ve had training on apps and software – and so has everyone else I know who’s been forced to use any form of enterprise software. One company I worked for once had every employee undertake training on our new expenses software. It included a module on changing your password. For too long enterprises have forced poor software on their employees… but no more!

And what’s the point of this post? Well it’s to call-out enterprise software and to tell it that it needs to up its game. Traditionally, software given to employees to use has been given next to no time in terms of graphical design, let alone any dedicated UX focus. And don’t get me started on employee-facing mobile apps.

Perhaps the reason for this has been how tough it used to be to build good apps, maybe it’s because there wasn’t any evidence that showed the evidence of correlation between quality of the software and user adoption and productivity. It could be that there used to be a smaller mobile workforce expected to have mobile apps to assist in their everyday tasks, so maybe less investment was put in. There’s also no doubt that the pre-hybrid-app-world required larger, and more specialist, development teams… so as you can see, not everything was stacked in the favour of users getting good apps from the companies.

It’s clear though, that the number of mobile workers is growing at an incredible rate. This could be thanks to the real adoption of SaaS, perhaps due to its increased accessibility and proven stability. And with this growing workforce comes growing expectations. As I said earlier, I was trained to use internal systems at previous employers, but I’ve never had training on Amazon, Ebay, Trello, Jira, or banking apps… so why on Earth should we think it acceptable to release software to our own employees that isn’t intuitive enough, or works well enough, for them to be able to use without training? THIS STOPS HERE.

ionicon-settings

As designers, developers, CTOs, and architects, what do we need in our tool-chest to right these wrongs?

  • Outstanding Performance – If our apps don’t function well, in terms of speed and robustness, then our app isn’t performing. And if our app doesn’t perform, our users won’t use it.
  • BYOD – Users don’t want to carry around specific devices for their business tasks, would you?
  • Familiarity of UI – Sure, companies want to have full control over the branding of their apps, but that’s not the same thing as disabling the users’ muscle memory because you’ve decided to use a set of non-standard icons in your app.
  • A Standard-Based Open Stack – There’s many benefits to using standard open tools in your stack. A couple of key ones are the community support, and backing a horse that’s got a low risk of becoming neglected.

Ionic – It’s got Enterprises’ Back

Tis true, Ionic answers a whole lot of questions when it comes to turning around enterprise software.

ionic-formular

Their recognition of performance issues in mobile apps, and the impact that it can have on users, has led to them make incredible progress in enabling apps to perform beautifully, even across older versions of both iOS and Android. You simply don’t get this in other solutions. As I said, I really like what Ionic have done, across the board, but this one thing is the real key for me. Janky apps need to die.

And their out-the-box platform continuity is entirely painless. There’s no need for users to be served up Android-looking apps on iOS devices, there’s no chance that they’ll be confronted by an unfamiliar UI that makes them stumble in their tasks.

Being based upon open web standards, the hugely popular AngularJS has many benefits too;

  • Existing web developers can pick up the code with ease, they don’t necessarily need to have any bespoke training or qualifications.
  • The development of the framework and its underlying technology is all in the open.
  • There are many developers around the world building with the tools, filing bugs and fixing issues.
    Support channels are numerous and active.

The above points not only mean that there are many already trained developers out there, but also that your application relies on a single code-base, thus removing issues not only with having two sets of skills, but also with minimising other tasks further down the chain, such as testing.

What it Means for your Business

Using Ionic as part of your stack when delivering apps can be boiled down to a couple of key points – though for me my favourite aligns absolutely with our goal at MobileCaddy – which is that it enables developers to get on with engineering functions and features that drive business value.

ionicon-graph

In the same way that MobileCaddy frees up the solution designers and developers from having to re-solve the implementation of a robust, offline process, Ionic frees them up from worrying about reinventing highly performant scrolling lists of thousands of items, or having to put effort into providing familiar UIs across different OSs.

Experience of such a solution can be read about in this interview with one of our clients. They ended up with an award-winning mobile app that blew all expectations out of the water.

And now it’s time to do your bit; start giving your employees the apps and experience they deserve and expect, and trust me, you’ll be seeing the benefits too.


Updated Shell Apps – v1.2.0

The latest version of our two starter apps for creating mobile applications for Salesorce are now live, and they come with some funky new features.

Sync / Connectivity Icon

We have a nice new icon that shows the current connectivity state of the device, and whether or not your app is currently syncing data to-and-from the Salesforce back-end.

MobileCaddy Sync Icon

This handy little icon can be added to your templates via a directive like this; no other work is needed;

Outbox Functionality

We’ve included example outbox functionality in the app for you to use as you see fit. There’s a template, controller and service all available for you to examine and make use of.

In our experience, having the transparency of the state of any records that might need syncing back to the platform is a real win when it comes to users trust in their mobile applications.

Unit Test Coverage

It’s not all about functional updates – we have also updated the skeleton unit-test setup to include code coverage reporting

Unit test code coverage reporting

SyncService

The SyncSercvice (www/js/service/sync.service.js) is among other parts of the shell app to get some love. This update inlcudes;

  • initialSync – This function gives you a nice easy call to make your app perform an initial synchronisation call to the platform. This call is lighter than the standard sync offered by this service. We’ve also added the neccessary code to the app.js to call this for you – so you don’t need to do anything more than configure the tables that you want to be synchronised. This config is specified at the top of the SyncService file.
  • Event broadcasting – The sync service now broadcasts a handy set of messages to let the rest of the app know what’s going on. It lets us know once an initialSync has been completed, and also when each table has had it’s synchronisation completed, even when part of a multi-table sync operation.

LocalNotificationService

We have also updated the LocalNotificationService to add a more structured solution to providing notifications to your users. The current code includes support to let the users know that they have records that need to be synced. The code to actually support this has been commented out by default (in the SyncService).

These updates are available in both our tabbed-navigation and side-menu navigation Ionic starter applications and can be used via the MobileCaddy CLI.


London Salesforce Developer Meetup – July Review

Last month’s London Salesforce DUG meetup was an odd one. It was a viewing party for the keynote(s) of the TrailheaDX – the annual Salesforce Developer conference. As interesting, and enjoyable, as it was, I was pleased this month’s agenda was back to the “couple of talks and then chat”.

But before all that, Keir Bowden kicked off with a short community message… “we want more speakers”. So if you have a passion for something that you think the Salesforce Developer community might like, or a demo of something cool, then please, please get in touch with the group.

“We want more speakers, get in touch”
– London Salesforce DUG Organisers

The Welkin Suite IDE – Rustam Nurgudin

Starting off the talks was Rustam, CEO of The Welkin Suite, the company behind the IDE that is really impressing Salesforce devs. He told us how their IDE was born of frustration with the existing tools that were available. As with other great products, they saw a problem and – in my eyes at least – have made some incredible dents in it.

The Welkin Suite logo

The amount of features and tools in the suite just seems boggling. The core editor has everything and more that you’d expect in an editor… and then some;

  • Code completion
  • Syntax highlighting (apex and Lightning, I believe)
  • Mini-map (with magnified preview and error highlighting)
  • Snippets
  • Unit test statuses and actions available in the margin
  • And probably others – Rustam was demoing faster than I can take notes!

Other parts of the IDE included Unit Test (code coverage, jump from logs to source, retrospective debugs and more), a Profiler, class libraries and project inspector. The latter includes the neat support of specifying your own folder hierarchy that can be shared with other members of your team. Oh, and I almost forgot their WAVE PREVIEW FEATURE!

For the time being it’s free and is available on Windows, with a Mac version coming soon. Rustam believes that in future there’ll be a monthly subscription for use… but to be honest talking to the other devs who were at the meet it seems the features of the IDE are well worth a small recurring fee.

I chatted to Rustam following the meet and he’s very keen to get developers outside of their business using it, and is openly requesting feedback… so what are you waiting for, download The Welkin Suite now and let him know what you think!

Road to Becoming a CTA – Sunny Matharu

Up next was Sunny Matharu, of Deloitte. He told us how they’ve recently been discussing the updates to the types of architects that will (or do, now) exist in the Salesforce ecosystem. The talk title seemed to be a bit link-bate-esq, but I’ll forgive him, as it was a really good open talk and discussion on the new state of certifications relating to Salesforce architects.

What we actually covered was the new certifications that are ( and will be, maybe) available, and how they all fit together and what they will (probably) mean for the dreaded final CTA review board exam.

“Sometimes I wonder if Salesforce make more money from licenses or certifications”
– Anonymous

So this is all a little confusing and still new – and/or not yet out finalised- so please take what follows with a pinch of Safe-Harbour-salt. Salesforce have introduced 3 new Domain Specialist certifications and are going to introduce 2 new Domain Architect certifications.

Salesforce Architect Certifications Hireachy

The Domain Specialist certs are made up of;

Looking into the study guide of the Mobile Solutions Architecture Designer certificate it seems to cover a lot of what we undertake every day at MobileCaddy. Be it designing solutions to support secure mobile Salesforce applications across multiple devices on multiple OSs. Or understanding and explaining the suitability, strengths and limitations of the different options an organisation might face when undertaking a mobile transformation project. The materials already available to support those wanting to gain this accreditation appears to be pretty thorough… I just hope that a mention of MobileCaddy in an exam would get the participant extra credit :)

As for the two Domain Architects certs it’s believed that they will be as below… but at time of writing the closest I could find online was a note on the Architect Academy to say they’re “Coming Soon”.

  • Application Architect
  • System Architect

Sunny went on to say that the idea behind these extra certifications was that it would hopefully reduce the failure rate of the CTA final review board, by breaking down areas of expertise into individual chunks and exams. I wanted to find out more about how he’d got all this info, but I missed him after the talks, but from what I gathered he, through Deloitte, had been chatting to EMEA CTA expert at Salesforce.

“The number of Salesforce certs on a project team can affect how they are won”
– Sunny Matharu

I really enjoyed the open discussion of this session, and Sunny came across as a very knowledgable and personable chap, and one I hope we hear more from at the DUG.

Wrap Up

As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed the make-up of this month’s DUG; both talks were full of knowledge and passion and I think everyone in the audience took at least a few items of interest from them.

As usual, the chats following the meet were entertaining and thought provoking, and definitely worth sticking around for. It’s was good catching up with folks I’d met before as well as new faces… including one chap I’d spoken to many times on conference calls but not actually met before.

Of course no write-up would be complete with a nod to all the sponsors (CapGemini, MobileCaddy) and organisers.

Recordings of the talks should be available on the London Salesforce DUG YouTube channel in the near future, make sure you follow MobileCaddy Devs on twitter to get notified once they’re up.


How Salesforce can lead Gartner’s Mobile App Magic Quadrant

In June 2016, Gartner released their Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms report. It looked at the major vendors within the MADP (Mobile Application Development Platform) space and evaluated them against multiple factors, including customer experience, pricing, marketing understanding, and innovation.

Gartner Magic Quadrant 20a16
Image: Gartner

Within the report, Salesforce is favourably judged and comes a clear third, both in terms of Completeness of Vision, and also for the Ability to Execute. First and second place are closely contested between IBM and Kony.

Whilst third isn’t a bad position, with the addition of MobileCaddy to your tool-belt, it’s clear that it becomes a real contender to take the lead spot.

Mobile App Testing

In the report Gartner notes “In the Salesforce App Cloud platform, mobile app testing support and its integration with third-party testing services are not such a focus area as in other MADP offerings.” Whilst this is true for apps written to be consumed within the Salesforce1 container, it certainly isn’t for custom applications built upon the Salesforce Mobile SDK.

MobileCaddy applications have their client part written in JavaScript, and as such are well supported by existing testing frameworks, services, and continuous integration setups. As well as having the client code being pushed through CI processes – for example Travis CI, Jenkins or Pipelines – we’re also able to push automated testing through real devices using open tools such as appium, as well as third-party services.

MobileCaddy Apps can be tested through 3rd part CI tools

Image: Atlassian

At our very core is the belief that app performance is paramount, and as developers, designers, and architects, we need not just our applications to be paranoid, but also our development and deployment workflows too.

Custom UI and UX

The report writes, “Customers must temper their expectations on RMAD (Rapid Mobile App Development) capabilities, because the Salesforce1 container approach to deploying apps created with App Builder poses UX limitations.” As accurate as this is for those applications that are built with and for Salesforce1, it’s certainly not the case that Salesforce customers are limited to this when it comes to application UI and UX.

With MobileCaddy you can have a fully custom UI and UX in your application, whilst retaining the incredible flexibility, scalability, and security of the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce Mobile App with Custom UI/UX through MobileCaddy

Image: MobileCaddy

At MobileCaddy we openly support and promote the use of the highly-rated Ionic Framework in providing the UI layer for Salesforce mobile apps. With the power of Ionic – it’s components, platform continuity, and performance focus – we’ve been able to deliver beautiful apps that offer 100% bespoke design. These are ideal for community applications where it’s key that the branding of the application is truly aligned with that of the task and organisation it was built for. The custom UI enabled by MobileCaddy extends right through to the App Store listings and app icons.

The Bottom Line

Salesforce is a strong player on the MADP space. With the use of MobileCaddy it can be even stronger and address the concerns that Gartner had during its evaluation. Since the report Salesforce has also strengthened and refined its own position on mobile application development with the introduction of App Cloud Mobile.

Request an evaluation today to see how MobileCaddy and a Gartner-backed MADP can give you a true mobile advantage.

If you found this article interesting, our eBook can offer much deeper insight into how to leverage Salesforce to make sure you succeed with your own enterprise mobile apps.


Salesforce1 – How Offline is Offline?

Offline and Online chart

With the recent push of Salesforce’s App Cloud Mobile, their Summer ‘16 release, and the update to Salesforce1 for iOS, you’d be forgiven if you thought that full offline was now available to all Salesforce mobile users through the stack mentioned above. But as always, the Devil is in the detail.

The number one thing of all time asked for, for Salesforce1… is offline.
– Marcus Torres, Senior Director, Salesforce

It’s no lie that some offline functionality is available, and as Marcus Torres, Senior Director Product Management mentions, offline was one of the most requested features in Salesforce1. What we need to be aware of, as CTOs, Solution Architects, and Developers, though, is just how much offline functionality we get.

Offline Data in Salesforce1

Included in what we do get in Salesforce1 with offline read/edit support is:

  • Records for Recent Objects recently accessed, limited for the first five objects (excluding Files) in the Recent section of the Salesforce1 navigation menu.
  • Records for Other Objects viewed in current session
  • Note: that recent means records that have been accessed within the last two weeks.

So what don’t you get?

  • Access to Recent Objects you’ve never viewed
  • Access to Recent Objects you’ve not viewed in the last two weeks
  • Access to Recent Objects that are not in the top 5 of the “Recent section of the Salesforce1 navigation menu”
  • Access to other objects that have not been accessed in the current session
  • Access to dashboards not seen during the current session
  • Access to Visualforce pages.

Why is this Important?

A few scenarios spring to mind that could cause some issues with the above limitations:

Imagine a user of your app is a salesperson of agricultural equipment, they’re out visiting a client in the poorly connected countryside. They’ve already cached the account data they’ll need (they’ve even remembered to do that) and that’s proved useful as they were able to create a lead offline. Their meeting finishes earlier so they pop to another client at another farm nearby. That meeting goes really well, and they want to capture new opportunities… but they can’t, since this account’s details weren’t in their cache.

Or how about your users trying to take an order for a product they’ve not accessed before whilst selling medical supplies in a hospital?

If you can’t fulfill these tasks then your process,
and your business, is broken.

When it comes to business critical processes, not only complex ones, you need to go beyond Salesforce1’s offline capability.

With MobileCaddy your device not only downloads and securely stores your recent items – using the same encrypted method used in Salesforce1 – it also pulls down and keeps in sync any records that you might need for your work, so you can perform all your tasks offline.

MobileCaddy and Offline-First

MobileCaddy is built with disconnected users at its heart. By designing and supporting apps with an Offline-First approach MobileCaddy not only has its data offline, but also its logic. This means complex business logic and constraints – including parent/child relationships, field level access control, etc – are all in place and functioning, allowing for 100% offline create/edit support.

We’ve incorporated unique features such as full offline data and logic,
customisable UI, performance monitoring and analytics
– Justin Halfpenny, CEO, MobileCaddy

And because MobileCaddy apps are Offline-First they’re also faster. The majority of database reads and writes are to the local store, meaning normal page and app tasks are completed instantaneously, rather than waiting for network transactions to take place. As our CEO recently stated, app performance is not to be underestimated in the enterprise space.

MobileCaddy takes app performance even further. Instead of having all fields for all records buzzing up and down over the wire, we’re able to define exactly which fields should be mobilised, and also which records users require. And during sync operations we also only pass deltas across, lightening the load even further.

Take Home

When contemplating your Salesforce mobile solution make sure you’re aware of the constraints in the offerings available, and that you pick the route that’s going to give your organisation or your clients the mobile advantage they deserve. And in the words of Adam Seligman (EVP, App Cloud, Salesforce), “Sometimes you want to build completely custom apps… take advantage of local device features… do offline sync… we’ve got that in the mobile SDK.”

Fill-in the form below to see how MobileCaddy can really take your apps offline and experience the value of true enterprise mobility


MobileCaddy Dev Tips – Using the console

The developer tools available in modern browsers are just mind blowing, and we love them here at MobileCaddy. In this post I’m going to cover a couple of tips on how I use the JavaScript console to help me build and debug my MobileCaddy apps.

Calling Angular Services from the Console

Did you know you can call an Angular service from JS console? I didn’t.

angular-service-console-closeup

 

I honestly love the fact that you can do this, but I can’t remember where I first heard about it, so sorry for not crediting a source.

Let’s say you have a service called MyService with a function myFunction(), but it’s not behaving as you thought. You can call this function with these commands in the console;

How cool is that?

Calling MobileCaddy Utils from the Console

In the same light as the above you can call the MobileCaddy API from the console too.

mobilecaddy-utils-js-console-closeup

 

Let’s say you are having trouble with a smartSql call not returning what you want, or you want to make sure that you’re table contains the data you thought it did.

In the 2nd line I’m calling the MobileCaddy readRecords function passing in the “MC_Time_Expenses__ap” table name and, if the promise resolves I will log the output to the console, and if the call fails I will get a console error.

I have actually added the above two examples into the Sources –> Snippets in my Chrome dev tools so they’re easily accessible, and I can just copy, paste and modify them as I need to.

These two small tips have helped me no end, I hope they do the same for you too.


London Salesforce Developer Meetup – April Review

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s a Salesforce Ladies in Tech and Developer Super Meetup!

That’s right, the March meetup of the London Salesforce Developers joined forces with the Salesforce Ladies in Tech to hold a combined super-gathering.

The Brightgen offices in Salesforce Tower hosted us, and as ever I was dead pleased to ride in the outside elevator up to their amazing view over the city. And I was in great company on my way up, joined by both Jodi Wagner – one of the night’s speakers and all round Salesforce celeb – and the MobileCaddy CEO, Justin Halfpenny. Not only is he our CEO, but he’s also my brother and the latest member of the community to put their names forward to co-organise the London Salesforce DUG.

The evening was to have two talks, one from each of the meetup groups… but of course it started with a natter and a drink. Seriously, if you’ve not been to a meetup then I can’t recommend you attend enough. Even without the presentations they’re an incredible source of business and geek chat, and the odd slice of pizza.

Personal Branding – Jodi Wagner

First up was Jodi. She’s an incredibly active and passionate member of the community. Not only is she a co-organiser of the Salesforce Women in Tech meetup but she also co-organised the incredible London’s Calling and the recent Evening with Ladies who Salesforce. Oh, she’s also a delivery manager at Accenture, if she wasn’t busy enough already.

Jodi’s talk was all about personal branding, and she started with something that I hadn’t even begun to appreciate, and that’s the thought that personal branding isn’t about you, it’s about other’s perceptions of you. She recommended that, however vain it might be, it’s a good idea to google yourself. I did, and I was pleasantly relieved/surprised (delete as appropriate).

Search results for "todd halfpenny"

 

Once you know where you currently stand you then need to think about your Value Proposition, and where you want to be. Jodi has many suggestions around how to get there, and you can find all the details in her slides. Some key areas mentioned though include;

  • Planning
  • Know the channels – what you post on LinkedIn won’t necessarily work in your favour on Facebook, for example
  • Keep a schedule in mind – when are your target audience online
  • Monitor the results – tools can be used to see the reach and impact of your work.

A really nice touch to Jodi’s talk was a slide containing a few tips from some of the folk within the Salesforce ecosystem who appear to have mastered their online branding. A couple of messages seem to come through strongly, such as “Be authentic” and “Be consistent”, the latter could apply to message and cadence.

I had asked Jodi about whether or not she thought it was a good idea to have a personal account, as well as one for your professional self. She replied that if you get the balance right then a single account can be very strong; it was nice to hear her say that from my tweets and blogs that she knew that MobileCaddy was doing some incredible work with offline Salesforce apps, but also that I like food and go for a jog every now and again… I’ll take that.

Open Source & Apex Common and Apex Mocks

The next talk was actually in two parts, let’s respect that; The talks were by Andrew Fawcett and David Frudd of FinancialForce.

Getting the most out of the Salesforce Open Source Community

Salesforce has been notable of late in the Open Source world following its release of the Lightning Design System, but there are many more Salesforce (initiated and related) open source projects than that, and some have been around for quite some time. MobileCaddy are keen open source contributors too, not only into our own projects such as our mobile starter apps, but also the Salesforce Mobile SDK projects that we extend to provide fully offline mobile apps with custom UIs. We also contribute to other projects such as ngCordova and Ionic that help provide support for incredible hybrid mobile applications.

Andrew talked us through things of note to look out for when contemplating whether or not to contribute (or even use) open source projects, though more of interest to me was what you can get out of it. He spoke about how FinancialForce’s open source projects had helped them with;

  • Recruitment
  • Product Promotion
  • Social/ethical Rewards

What’s new in FinancialForce Apex-Common and Apex-Mocks?

Andrew’s colleague David was up next to talk about two of FinancialForce’s projects. Apex Common and Apex Mocks are two projects that we use and love at MobileCaddy and David gave us an explanation of each, and some of the new(ish) features and fixes that had been contributed not only by FinancialForce employees but also the wider open source community.

The fflib-apex-common repo gives you a wonderful project that aids Apex developers by giving them a best practice and practical design patterns library for use within their Salesforce applications. One can combine the beautiful modular code you get from using this library with the fflib-apex-mocks repo to achieve great coverage in your unit tests too.

For information and examples and tutorials on using these, and the other FinancialForce projects head over to their developer site.

Wrap Up

It was really nice to share the meetup with the Ladies in Tech, and I hope it’s something we get to do again. I’d love to have chatted to some of the other attendees more, but time as always was not on our side.

Videos of the evening’s talks should be available on the meetup’s YouTube channel (soon if not already there).

Thanks, as usual, to the organisers and sponsors.

The next meetup should fall on the 25th May, less than a week after the London edition of the Salesforce World Tour. I hope to be at the meetup if manning our sponsorship booth at the World Tour doesn’t prove too much for me. UPDATE: the meetup has moved to the 17th May – Developing Wave Apps with Skip Sauls, hope to see you there!

And if you are planning on coming to the World Tour in London then drop by our sponsor booth and check out some of the apps we’ve built for, and with, our partners, and how you too can realise the mobile advantage of taking the power of the platform with you.