What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is best known for being a cloud based customer relationship management (CRM) system. Being cloud based there is no expensive IT infrastructure required, you just need a laptop or computer with internet access. It can also do far more that being a CRM, for example with some development Salesforce can integrate with email marketing and your website front end.

As Salesforce suggest you really can step into the future with the World's #1 CRM system, 'No more digging through various spreadsheets, emails, and databases. Everything you and your team needs to be successful is stored in one place and accessible from anywhere'
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Salesforce Power of Us Program
You maybe thinking that's great, but we are a charity or social enterprise and we don't have much money for a CRM system, so how could we afford Salesforce? The good news is that Salesforce has a Power of Us Program which aims to improve communities around the world by offering 10 donated full licenses and heavily discounted additional licenses to non profit organisations. This makes Salesforce a very affordable and popular solution, especially for smaller non profit organisations.
Configuring Salesforce to work for you
Most charities need specialist support to configure Salesforce for their specific requirements. For more information on how Red River Projects can help you get going with Salesforce get in touch
Salesforce Lightning Experience
Lightning Experience is the fairly new Salesforce user interface, it is actually 2 years old and was first introduced in the winter'16 release. It will one day totally replace the Salesforce Classic interface, but that is likely to be a few years down the line. For now you can use Classic or Lightning, or both. If you are setting up a new Salesforce system use just Lightning not Classic. If you are using Classic start seriously planning how and when to switch (and there is the option to switch between the 2 interfaces). The list of reasons not to switch are pretty short now. Classic is now set in stone and each Salesforce release brings new improvements to Lightning. 
Lightning Salesforce Resources 
Lightning Now a community hub a for questions, answers and sharing
Circles of Success interactive discussions with Salesforce experts
Release Readiness Community Group the one step shop
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SALESFORCE RELEASES
Salesforce is continually innovating and upgrading their platform. Hundreds of new features are included in releases 3 times a year, each spring, summer and winter. See Salesforce Status & Maintenance and click on the instance of your Salesforce org, e.g. EU1 [see how to find your Salesforce org instance]
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Salesforce Ideas
Everyone can input to the Salesforce roadmap and development by creating and voting up (or down!) ideas via the Salesforce IdeaExchange
Red River has created or supports the following ideas. Do upvote if you agree!
1. Duplicate Management: Cross field matching this would highlight duplicates between multiple email or phone fields
​2. Create recurring Events in Lightning (as you can in Classic)
3. List View Controls for Task tab in LEX currently you can only view 'today's tasks' and 'today's events' on the home page in Lightning. (current status 'In development' so coming soon!
4. More than 4 fields on Related List in Lightning Experience
5. Don't show report-component reports in the recent-records component in LEX Home The Lightning home page has great options such as the Recent Records which provides quick links to the last 5 records visited. BUT if you add report charts or a dashboard component they eat into the 5 and are displayed at the top of the list. 
Favourites from recent Salesforce releases
See below Red River Projects favourite features from recent releases. You can add your ideas for how Salesforce can be improved via the Salesforce Community online. Also you can vote up or vote down ideas. See Salesforce IdeaExchange
Salesforce Winter'20 favourites
1. A Recycle Bin in Lightning
2. count unique values in report results (Beta)
Salesforce Spring '19 favourites
1. Pinned Lists in Lighting New users get very confused with the default 'recent records' when you click on a tab. This is a great new feature to replace it with the List View you use the most. Also great if you have lots of lists and you want to switch the one you are currently working on to the top.
2. Print a record page finally an option in Lightning!
3. In Lightning reports Resize columns to fit your content
Salesforce Winter '19 favourites
1. Comfy or compact display density setting users will have 2 options, they can view field labels above (comfy) or left (compact). The compact option is a throwback to the Classic interface, liking it!!
2. New 'Where is this used?' button you can check a fields references before you edit it (find out where it is used)
Salesforce Summer '18 favourites 
1. Path on Contacts. Great feature in Lightning which came out of the box on the Opportunity object and it's now an option to set up a path on the Contact record. Great for tracking a contacts 'supporter journey'.
2. Kanban view on Tasks, see Do More with Tasks from List View
Salesforce Spring '18 favourites
1. New formula feature ADDMONTHS no more lengthy formula's to calculate say a specific date 6 months from now
2. New Themes - you can now chose different background colours in Lightning. liking 'Lightning Lite' see Show Your True Colors with Themes in Lightning Experience
3. Duplicate Jobs this is new ground for Salesforce to help identify existing duplicates (good one for GDPR)
4. ​Organize Components into Collapsible Sections new Accordion component. Lightning version of Classic collapsable sections.
Salesforce Winter '18 favourites 
1. Mass Inline Editing at last! plus other neat improvements to list views like wrapped text and reset column widths
2. New Time field type (beta) - can now track time not specific to a date, e.g. preferred call time.
3. The blue background (in the next Spring '18 release you will be able to customise the background colour). Plus includes improvement to density, legibility and contrast.
Salesforce Summer '17 favourites
1. ​This release includes a ramp up of the Lightning Experience Migration Experience to help you assess your readiness to switch from Classic and support to prepare for the change.
2. At last!! The field history related list is now supported in Lightning Experience. So you can now view tracked field changes as you can in Salesforce Classic (this has been on Red River Projects radar for a long time).
Salesforce Spring '17 favourites 
1. Feel Confident About Your Lightning Experience Readiness available via setup, useful if you are considering the switch from classic
2. Lightning for Gmail (Beta) if you use gmail it's a great feature for accessing Salesforce data direct from Gmail 
Salesforce Winter '17 favourites
This is the release that really tips it! Literally, the Lighting navigation bar changes from vertical to horizontal
Winter 2016 favourites
1. The new Salesforce interface Lightning Experience - looks pretty good, but still it's early days. There are significant limitations to the current version including no ability to export reports to Excel, no inline editing in lists, no record merging, no mass emailing and custom object are not listed in the navigation menu (it takes a number of clicks to view custom objects via App Launcher > Other Items. 
2. Favourite new feature with Lightning Experience is the ability to visualize list view data with charts
​3. Increased roll-up summary limit per object - increased from 10 to 25
Summer 2015 favourites
1. the logo!
2. Login access policy changed - system administrators can now login as any user, no need to 'raise a case' to request it
3. Data Loader for Mac
4. Report management for partner and customer users - create and edit reports
Spring 2015 favourites
1. Duplicate Alerts and Blocking
2. Standard Address Fields Show Google Maps
3. Create or Edit Records Owned by Inactive Users
Winter 2015 feature favourites
1. Social Customer Service Starter Pack (Pilot)
2. Duplicate Management (Beta)
3. Add Custom Lookup Fields on Activities (Beta)
4. Profile-based password policies 

​© 2018 Red River Projects Ltd.