Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Ian Gotts, founder and CEO of Elements.cloud, to find out more about GDPR and processes for large organizations. For February and March, we’re setting our sights on productivity with a series of topics to help you focus on being a productive Admin and how you can deliver productivity to your users.

Join us as Ian Gotts explains how GDPR affects you whether you’re in the EU or not, why you should view it as an opportunity and not a hassle,

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ian Gotts.

The basics of GDPR

Ian is the CEO of Elements.cloud, an ISV running on AWS but tightly integrated with Salesforce. He joins us on the podcast to talk about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a European data privacy standard. “Our data is now spread over the world in multiple systems,” Ian says, so it’s time to update our privacy laws.

The regulations are due on May 25, 2018, and the fines are up to €20,000 or 4% of global revenue, whichever is higher, so it’s probably something to stay on top of. “There are about 100 clauses and I think I’ve read all of them, which makes me not all that fun at parties,” Ian says (Gillian disagrees). “The principle is privacy by design,” Ian says, “you need to build privacy at the center of the way you manage your customers’ data.”

In the US, data privacy tends to be opt-out, as in companies will use your customer data unless you opt out. GDPR flips that on its head— customers have to explicitly give permission for companies to use their data. The thing is, even though it’s a European standard it applies to any companies that are holding European data, whether you’re in eCommerce, software, higher ed, or travel hospitality.

Think about the benefits, not the fines

With regulations, Ian advocates a different perspective: “Think about benefits, not fines.” 4% of revenues is a big enough number to get your CEO’s attention, “and that can start to drive some of those projects that we want to get driven.” The other thing is that, while it’s a European standard, Ian thinks it’s likely to be the global norm in the next five years. “Getting a jump on this drives up our reputation with our customers, and the act of getting rid of that data which you shouldn’t have means you’re clearing out your databases of dead email addresses, so you can build a proper engagement with those customers,” Ian says.

The bottom line is that finding a way to comply actually pushes you to improve as a company. As Ian says, “Those people who do compliance well actually get a better-run business.” It’s about coordinating your marketing, sales, and customer service departments, and GDPR is just a catalyst.

The three jobs an Admin needs to do to comply with GDPR

“There are about 13 clauses in GDPR where there are specific things you have to go and do,” Ian says. For example, if there’s a subject matter access request you have 30 days to be able to tell a customer everywhere you hold their data. For a data breach, you have 72 hours to report it. “There are things you’ve got to better, there are new processes you need to put in place,” Ian says, “but there are a whole bunch of other processes you’ve already got that you need to improve on.”

For Salesforce Admins, there are basically three jobs. One, you need to start thinking about how Salesforce gets used inside your organization. How does the lead to opportunity process work? What about the sales support process? At what points are you going to need to ask for consent?

Secondly, you need to build a data inventory. “This is the scary one,” Ian says, “because you’ve got to go and identify every field in your company where you hold customer data.” Finally, make sure that you’re leveraging those fines to make sure that you can make some serious changes to your Org. The important thing is that this is a long-term change, “GDPR isn’t just for the 25th of May, it’s ongoing,” Ian says, “so you’ve got to find some techniques for how you’re going to manage those customer data fields when people start to add new fields or new objects.”

Resources:

• Trailblazer Community GDPR Group
• Trailhead: European Union Privacy Law Basics module
• GDPR Superheroes
• GDPR Exec Overview & benefits not fines article  https://elements.cloud/2017/11/20/grpr-exec-overview/
• Access to free GDPR processes & building Data Inventory https://elements.cloud/gdpr
• Tackling GDPR for Admins webinar recording https://vimeo.com/246139592

Twitter:

• @iangotts
• @GDPRSuperheroes
• @gilliankbruce
• @salesforceadmns

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Kevin Poorman, a Salesforce Developer Evangelist, to find out how Admins and Devs can work together more productively to build great apps.

More about this Insights session: tips for Admins working with Devs, why every conversation needs to be centered on the users first, how to decide between declarative and programmatic solution, and tips for when you first start with a Developer.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kevin Poorman and Gillian Bruce.

A Developer and Admin collaboration for life

Kevin is a particularly great guest to talk to about working with Salesforce Admins because his wife, Stephanie, is one. “The two of us work together in a nonprofit org called Pets for Patriots,” Kevin says, which helps veterans and current military personnel adopt companion pets from shelters. There’s a lot that comes up when you’re helping a nonprofit, “Everything from year-end reporting to custom processes and Apex work that has to be done, so my wife and I live out this Admin and Developer relationship pretty much every day. We do everything but manage our household in Salesforce.”

When Kevin thinks about how he and Stephanie work together, the key thing is that “we have to keep our users first and foremost in our mind.” Despite their many diverse talents, not every Pets for Patriots employee is particularly tech savvy, “so keeping things simple has got to be at the center of what we’re doing.” Whenever they run into a problem, Kevin says, “we have to not only come up with a solution that works but a solution that works for our users.”

Deciding between code and declarative solutions

One of the keys to working together as an Admin and Dev pair is to solution things together. For Kevin, it starts with a simple question: “Is there a clean declarative way of solving this problem?” It can be a hard question to answer because there are lots of things you can do in a declarative way that aren’t necessarily simple or easy to maintain.

Maintenance is super important because you’re not always going to be around forever. While you don’t need to know code in order to manage declarative solutions, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to maintain. A classic example would be choosing between process builder, workflow rules, or a trigger. “That question can almost always be solved with process builder,” Kevin says, “but sometimes writing it as a trigger is beneficial.” If you’ve inherited an org with existing triggers, for example, it makes sense to put all of the logic in a trigger, but other times you’ll want to handle it in a process.

When you’re thinking about flows versus verses Visualforce or Lightning components for something like a wizard, the decision between who should build something come to the forefront. Kevin’s wife will want to solve it with a flow, but Kevin will be thinking about using Visualforce or Lightning Components. “To be honest with you, I don’t always know why because flow is often the cleaner way of doing it,” Kevin says, “I think it’s just my ingrained developer-ness.”

The amazing power of Lightning Out

Gillian put a question to Kevin that should be on the front of every Admin’s mind when working with Devs, “What is a Lightning Component that isn’t built yet but should be a standard component?” Kevin slightly twists the question to focus on Lightning Out, which he’d want to use to build a Gmail plugin that brought bits and pieces of Lightning and Records into Gmail.

Imagine a side panel where, when you open an email from someone @company.com, and it shows the company.com account and their contact on the sidebar through Lightning and you had a component there that would let you update or edit the account record from there. “Lightning Out is my favorite under-utilized portion of Lightning,” Kevin says, “it gives you the ability to load Lightning components and apps external to Salesforce.” You can do things like put a lead component on your website that will go straight into the org, instead of web-to-lead.

A tip for starting with a new Dev

For Admins that are just beginning to cultivate their relationship with their developer, Kevin has a big tip: ask to do code reviews with them. “As you’re starting to with a developer, ask if you can do code reviews of the code that they’re writing so you have an understanding or how it’s happening and how it works,” he says. That lets you start a conversation about solutioning, and really have that back and forth about which things you should do declaratively and which should be solved with code.

Trailhead

• Developer Beginner Trail

Twitter

• @codefriar
• @gilliankbruce
• @salesforceadmns

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t, head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.