One of the key differentiators between OmniScripts and Screen Flows is the superior handling of advanced processes with loops and really complex branches, available with Screen Flows.  Is there a way to build a form with a loop-like experience, without depending on code, and without leveraging Flow?

Architecting Advanced Looping & Branching with OmniStudio

Negotiation is a key skill for architects. During the design and implementation of a solution, there will be conflicts between your point of view and the points of view of others - your client, your end users, your technical team. Being able to negotiate well means you are able to view these conflicts strategically, and discuss and resolve them acceptably. 

Architect Soft Skills Series 4 - Negotiation

Too many people avoid booking Salesforce cert exams out of fear of failure. How can you make the idea of failing a little less scary so that you too can fail and grow from it?

Failure and Salesforce Exams

There are some requirements that just do not fit the Salesforce core platform. We architects need to be able to weigh up options and make best practice recommendations for the right solution, including knowing what aspects of your solution should be on-platform or off-platform.

On vs Off Platform Solutioning

Architects usually do not have a lot of concrete authority, or sign-off on a project - which means to succeed in your architect role, especially as a consultant or contractor, you need to build influence with your client and the team. To influence people you need to first gain their trust.

Architect Soft Skills Series 3 - Trust

Sometimes people say that communication is a two-way street. I guess I would liken it more to a multi-lane highway, with on-ramps and off-ramps and people cutting in on you and your GPS is sometimes broken - there is a LOT of input demanding our attention and getting in the way of our ability to clearly communicate with others.

Architect Soft Skills Series 2 - Understanding

When you are designing a solution, there are some common, repeatable solutions you will find yourself using over and over. The architectural principles and structure behind these repeatable solutions are known as architectural patterns.

ELI5: What Are Architectural Patterns, Anyway?

Soft skills are not called soft because they are easy. Where a hard skill is about structure, facts, true or false statements - soft skills melt in around the edges, providing cushion to those cold hard facts.

Architect Soft Skills Series 1 - Introduction & Communicating

Salesforce has a number of objects and data models designed to support multiple use cases for tracking information about businesses and people. It can get a little confusing - which should I use? Can I change my mind later? Everyone keeps saying Person Accounts sucks and I should steer clear, is it really that bad? Well, hopefully I can help you answer these questions!

Businesses, Households, Person Accounts and Individuals - Which Should You Use?

You’ve got an existing Salesforce org, and you’re looking at switching on Person Account. Salesforce has a Person Account implementation guide, and while this is useful, I think it is missing some important information, so here are my tips to supplement the guide.

Tips for Implementing Person Accounts in an Existing Salesforce Org

It is often still necessary to run certain applications on an EC2 instance, particularly if it is not easily containerised, and you do not want to pay extra for a managed service. In a non-production environment, you will be able to reduce costs by shutting down these instances when they are not needed by your developers or users.

Reduce Costs with Scheduled EC2 Instance Shutdowns on AWS

Viewing run logs for your development work is vital to ensuring your tasks are executing as you expect them to. However this can sometimes be more difficult in Apache Airflow, and the reasons may not be very clear to you, the developer. We will look at one scenario where this happens, and how you can work around it while improving your logging mechanics.

Efficient and Durable Logging for Apache Airflow in AWS

Geoscience data has typically been harder to obtain as it comes from disparate source systems and physical media, and the file sizes — particularly for seismic surveys — can be massive. The Geological Survey of Queensland (GSQ) has recently undergone a data modernisation transformation, and terabytes of geoscience data is now available on their new Open Data Portal (ODP).

Bulk Download up to 20 TB of Queensland’s Geoscience Data using an API

Accessing rich datasets from public web platforms is a common scenario for clients and the trend looks set to continue. The number of social media users is growing by the millions as more people get access to faster and cheaper smart devices. For one of our clients, getting data from some of these online platforms and matching them with their internal databases seemed like it would be a time consuming process.

Automated Website Scraping

For distributed databases, efficient processing and transfer of records and values is paramount. Semijoins allow for data to be sent back and forth in a way that sounds like more work, but may in fact have less data transfer than an equivalent traditional inner join.