Lightning Bolt

Lightning Bolt is a feature within Experience Cloud that acts as a community template. Previously, templates for your community were only provided by Salesforce. With the introduction of Lightning Bolt, partners may also create templates for you to use, increasing the number of options available to you by quite a lot. Use Bolts to easily preassemble and preconfigure your new communities.

A Lightning Bolt includes a theme, layout, pages, and components. A piece is a way the community site looks and has CSS. Pages hold components, and components are the building blocks of the page. Several elements may be combined on pages to get the output you want.

An easy way to build your Bolt is to start with another Bolt as a base. Remove pages you do not need for your specific use cases and add on new pages where necessary. Change existing pages if they are close to what you need. Add, remove, and modify components on each page to further customize and tailor the Bolt to your needs. After you have made all your changes, you now have a Bolt of your own, which you can export as your package.

Process Builder

Process Builder is a simple point-and-click development tool provided by Salesforce to drive business process automation. It is differentiated from Flow by being more straightforward as well as quicker to use. However, it is not as powerful.

Processes are made up of a trigger, a criteria node, and at least one action. Triggers identify when a process should be run. As an example, a trigger can be set to run a function when a record is updated or created. Criteria set the rules for whether the process should be run after a trigger is hit. These can be data validation rules, for example. Finally, Actions are what the function does after the criteria have been met. Actions may be scheduled or taken immediately and can do things such as create records, send emails, or post messages to a Chatter feed.

Consider using the Process Builder for your community to update child cases as parent cases are changed. It can also be used to create new cases and automate the process. Finally, use it to update your solutions and add comments to your cases.

Flow

Flow is the most powerful business process automation tool used in Salesforce. It is more potent than Process Builder and more complicated to use due to that. Use Flow (Figure 12-1) when you need more complex automation than what you can achieve with Process Builder.

To give an example, Flow includes screen interactions, while Process Builder cannot. Screen interactions (Figure 12-2) are the screens the user can see. Information is displayed, which the user can then click and interact with items on the page. User interface screen elements collect information from the user and pass it to other components in your Flow to be processed .

A Flow is comprised of elements that represent actions, connectors to show the path of the Flow, and finally resources, which are values the Flow references throughout its courses. All of these come together to manipulate data in Salesforce in an intelligent, controlled manner.

As Flow goes through its paths, it uses logic elements to help make decisions and changes. The decision element is self-explanatory. It is used to make the Flow determine the direction in which it will continue. The assignment element (Figure 12-3) is used to change the value of variables. The loop element goes through the importance of a variable that holds a collection. Finally, the waiting factor will cause the flow to wait for an event to occur. All of these help the Flow progress using logic.

Your Flow can also utilize data manipulations . These include standard manipulations, such as record (Figure 12-4) update, delete, and create. Email alerts are available as well and are like Process Builder.

Any quick actions you have created within your organization are also available to use in your Flows.

The last main element of a Flow is, again, Resources. These are the objects which hold the data which gets passed around and altered. One widely used Resource is the variable. It contains values that get passed throughout the Flow. These values can also change both due to the Flow and through external input. Collection variables are similar, but instead are a series of variables with the same data type.

A subject variable is like a regular variable, but it holds a record of a specific object type. This means that while a variable has one value, a subject may have several values, and you can access all the record’s fields. There are also subject collections of which you can probably guess the purpose – they hold multiple records of the same type.

There are many more Resource types, but here are just a few more. A Constant is a value, similar to a variable, except it never changes throughout the Flow. A Formula uses Resources in the Flow as input to generate an output value. Lastly, there is the Choice. This is simply an individual choice to be made in the Flow .

Putting It All Together

Now that we have gone over the different components which can go into creating your Salesforce Community, it is time to put it all together. Hopefully, you have a pretty good understanding of the different parts which go together to make your Bolt page. For more in-depth explanations, you can always find online help from Salesforce and Trailhead.

To start, find a preexisting Bolt that is close to what your business needs. Make changes to it, such as adding, removing, or changing pages and components. Once you have the Bolt in a state which works best for you, create Processes using the Process Builder that it will need to run. Implement those, and then use Flow to create more powerful Processes.

Once your Processes have been integrated, it is time to finalize the creation of your Bolt. Export the Bolt and then build a package. Finally, install that package. Once that has been done, your Bolt is finished and ready to use. Your business has its very own self-service community, prepared to go.

Salesforce Optimizer

You can have your administrator analyze your implementation to find ways to simplify customizations and drive feature adoption. Consider running Salesforce Optimizer as part of your monthly maintenance, before installing a new app, before each Salesforce release, or at least once a quarter. I highly recommend this practice.

Salesforce Optimizer PDF

Salesforce generates a PDF report (Figure 12-10) with recommendations to improve your implementation and then saves the report to Salesforce Files.

When you work through each of the feature items listed in the report, you will be presented with status and result.

For example, an optimizer with an immediate action and recommendation (Figure 12-11) is telling me the results (immediate action required) and the recommendations with approximate time to carry out these recommendations to resolve the issue.

It would be best if you considered having your administrator run the optimizer at least once a month and identify immediate action and action-required items at a minimum. Review required and not currently enabled should be next in line once the first two sets of critical item sets are resolved.

Classic Letterheads

Letterheads (Figure 12-12) are applicable only for classic email templates. Your administrator can set up your Letterhead to standardize the look and feel of HTML email templates.

You have to create a letterhead only once. There are three main parts to a letterhead – header, body, and footer. Your administrator can customize the look and feel of your letterhead.

Unfiled Public Classic Email Templates

There are a number of email templates (Figure 12-13) that come with Salesforce out of the box. The classic email templates you create here can be used with the following features, in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience. The Salesforce Lightning Desktop offers a new email experience where administrators and end users can write email and create templates directly from records in Salesforce:

• Approvals

• Big Deal Alert

• Cases

• Case Assignment Rules

• Case Escalation Rules

• Communities

• Email to Case

• Lead Assignment Rules

• Process Builder

• Web to Lead

• Workflow

• Lightning Email Action (in Lightning Experience only)

• Lightning List Email Action (in Lightning Experience only)

• Salesforce Classic Email Author (in Salesforce Classic only)

Marketing: Product Inquiry Response

You can have your administrator use merge fields to personalize your email (Figure 12-14) content. Your administrator can add substitute text to any merge field. Substitute text displays only if the merge record does not contain data for that field. Have your administrator enter substitute text after a comma in the merge field, for example, {!Contact.FirstName,Sir or Madam}. When you save the template, the merge field will appear in the email body of the template with the following syntax: {!NullValue(Contact.FirstName,"Sir or Madam")}. Click the following link to see a sample email template.

Note that the description field is for internal use only. It will be listed as the title of any email activities you log when sending mass email.

This yields the email shown in Figure 12-15.

Email to Salesforce

Email to Salesforce allows you to automatically log emails you send from third-party email accounts as activities on Lead and contact records in Salesforce.

After Email to Salesforce is activated, users can access the My Email to Salesforce page to view their unique Email to Salesforce address and customize their settings. You should send the notification email (Figure 12-16) to the users to notify them that Email to Salesforce has been activated.

Organization-Wide Email Footers

Your administrator can add footers to emails sent from Salesforce. The administrator can create default footers (Figure 12-17) – one for single emails and one for mass emails – or create one for each character encoding (General US and Western Europe, Korean, etc.).

Default footers are used if no footers match the outgoing email's character encoding.

Enhanced Email

Your administrator can enhance email or elevate email to a standard Salesforce object, with customization options and an API. Emails are no longer stored as tasks, but as full-featured records, complete with details, related lists, and collaboration tools. On email records, users can view their messages exactly as their customers do, complete with formatting.

Organization-Wide Email Addresses

An organization-wide email address (Figure 12-18) associates a single email address to a user profile. Each user in the profile can send email using this address. Users will share the same display name and email address.

You will have to verify the email link which will be sent from Salesforce .

Outlook Configurations

Microsoft Outlook integration improves the productivity and synchronization of the team. Salesforce contacts and Leads can be easily added to email recipients. New outbound emails can be added as tasks in Salesforce, ensuring effective monitoring and execution of important action items. Similarly, sent or received emails can also be added as tasks or cases. Furthermore, Outlook items like contacts, events (Figure 12-19), and tasks (See Figure 12-20) can be easily associated with Salesforce records, ensuring end-to-end management of activities, events, and tasks.

Outlook configurations define the settings that are applied to Salesforce for Outlook for specific groups of users. Setting up an outlooking configuration in Salesforce is straightforward. You have to define the options like Side Panel, Add Email, Create Case, or Default Sync rules in the email settings to control the services’ behavior. You also have to consider defining the rules under Sync Settings to control the behavior of Contacts, Events, and Tasks objects. Let’s talk Sync direction for a moment. In this setting, your Salesforce administrator has to define which direction record will sync: Salesforce to Outlook, Outlook to Salesforce, or Sync both ways. Another important setting is conflict behavior. Who wins when there is sync conflict. You could set Outlook always wins, or Salesforce always wins depending on the business strategy and system you trust as the authoritative system of record.

Create Case is an essential setting for the customer service team. If you want customer and service agents to create cases, it may require turning on Email-to-Case, which is currently disabled for your organization. To use this feature, you must enable Email to Case .

There are few options under Email Settings in Outlook Configuration we have to walk through. For example. Set default sync setting to Sync All Outlook Items. It takes effect the next time users update their Salesforce for Outlook configuration and settings (See Figure 12-21) from the Windows system tray, even with the option “Overwrite configuration changes made by users” selected. Another option under Email Settings doesn’t let users change their sync setting; this setting, if selected, prevents users from changing between Sync All Outlook Items and Sync Only the Outlook Items I Select. It takes effect the next time users update their Salesforce for Outlook settings from the Windows system tray.