MIS homework

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I did it! Check this OUT!

Ok, so I really, really wanted to impress my new “suit” friend/boss (Riley’s her name, BTW) and I wanted to make this the best app‐for‐tracking‐pitches‐to‐VCs‐&‐Angel‐investors ever in the history of humanity annnd…I did! (I think). So, my devoted followers, here’s everything I did to create my totally killer app & I’m listing it out step‐by‐step so you can follow along if you want to try it too.

But first, before you startup Salesforce, let me give you the gist of what I did and why so you know where this is going. So, to start out, I created what SF calls an “object”. (Most databases call them “tables” but SF likes to be different that way—sigh—we just accept and move on.) Objects, tables, whatever. Prof says they’re just a way to organize the data into what are like lists. And a big company might have tons of “lists” so keeping them as separate “objects” just makes it all easier to deal with.

Prof says an object is like a box for holding data, a box with rows and columns, just like the list of players on the scoreboard at a Giant’s game, for example. We’re used to thinking of lists as bunches of the same kinds of things (players), where each row is one individual of that type of thing (eg. Buster Posey) and the columns tell different kinds of things about the things in the rows, (eg. Buster wears the number 28, plays the catcher position — “C”, batting average=.321).

Well, objects are like lists of things you want to keep track of and when you create an object, you name it that way (like “players”). And the columns are called fields and you name them too (like “player name”, “position” & “batting average”, even though they don’t bother to put column headers on the scoreboard). The field names are like the column headers for a list. You can have as many fields as you want (almost) and you can name them whatever makes sense.

Besides telling SF the name of the field, you have to tell it the kind of stuff that will be going in there, like, is it numbers (how many digits, max, do you want?) or will it be text (like player names —how many letters, max?) or is it labels from a list (like position=“RF”, “LF”, “C”, “P”; there’s only 9 of them in baseball, case you’re not a fan). Telling the system this stuff helps it make the displays & reports look good and also helps it automatically keep some goofball from entering letters for the batting average, etc. that would mess up the database.

Giants Scoreboard—lists of player data (boo Dodgers)

Copyright © 2017 The Max Labs Project

So, back to my app for Riley. She wanted to keep track of these “pitches” she’s going to be making

where she tries to get potential investors, these VCs and Angels, to invest, hence I named my

object “pitches.” (These are like sales pitches but for investing. Nothing to do with baseball—that

Giants thing was just an example!)

SF comes already set up with a bunch of objects they created in advance to make it easy to use, as

soon as you start, for selling stuff, if that’s what you want to do with it. Those are called “standard

objects,” but you can always create your own “custom objects.” That’s what I did.

So now, get a SF account but do NOT get the the 30‐day free trial account! It won’t work for this! Instead you have to go to https://developer.salesforce.com/signup and get the free, lifetime

Salesforce “Developer Edition” (DE) account. The web page with the form should look like this:

On the signup page, enter your real name and use a real email address—one you can access—b/c

they send you an email with the link to click on to set your password & get started. (Do NOT use a Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL account–they don’t play nice with SF! To be safe, create new a Gmail account to use just for this.) For “Company,” I just used “SJSU” but you can use anything.

Check the email account you entered, find the “Welcome...Verify your account” message & click

VerifyAccount. Follow the instructions to set your password & Voila—you’re logged in!

Now, don’t panic! There’s a lot of stuff, tons of links & all these tabs for contacts, campaigns &

such. Probably useful someday when my company is actually selling stuff, but for now I wanted to

keep it simple so I just clicked on the goofy round character (profile) icon at the top right corner

next to the bell:

and, then in the popup window, under Options, I clicked Switch to Salesforce Classic.

That brings up a simpler screen with a feed where you could post & share messages, a calendar,

etc. But for now, just click on the blue pull‐down menu that says Site.com at the top right corner:

and select Marketing instead—just makes things easier.

Now you’re set! You can just follow along with how I figured out how to build an SF object (table) & the fields (columns) I would need for my app for Riley. (If a little yellow popups appear asking you to take a tour, just ignore. I’m your tour guide! Same for any yellow update popups, etc. Blah.)

So first, I decided I needed a record for every pitch Riley made (the “please invest in my company” kind of pitch, NOT the baseball kind). SF doesn’t have a Pitch object already built‐in (“out of the box”) so I had to create my own, a custom object, which I creatively named “Pitch”:

1. I clicked Setup (upper right next to your name)

2. Then under Build (on the lefthand vertical menu), I clicked Create and then Objects that appeared below it. (You may have to scroll down the page.)

3. Then I clicked the New Custom Object button in the center

Then to name my new object, I set this stuff:

4. for Label, I entered “Pitch” (don’t type the quote marks—just showing you stuff you type)

5. for Plural Label, “Pitches”

6. Then I skipped down to Record Name under Enter Record Name Label and Format

Now records are just the individual rows of data that go together for one instance of the kind of thing you’re tracking (eg. “Buster Posey,” “C”, “.321” all would go together as a baseball player record). And Prof says you want some kind of record ID—some field that’ll have a different value for every record, just to help keep them all straight. Sometimes you can just use names or Social Security Numbers or such but I know Riley won’t be getting investor’s SSNs so that won’t work.

Turns out SF has a built‐in way to create record IDs automatically and the Record Name settings are where you do that. You just have to tell SF how you want you want them numbered and how you want the IDs to look. Try the settings I used:

7. For Record Name enter “Pitch ID” (if it was filled already, just type over it)

8. Use the Data Type drop‐down menu to select Auto Number

9. In the Display Format textbox that opens up enter “P‐{000}” (tells SF to make the IDs look like “P‐027” and such; good enough to handle a thousand investors—plenty, but be sure to include the braces!)

10. For Starting Number enter the number 0 (not the letter “O”)

11. I checked Allow Reports in case I wanted to try that out later

12. Then I skipped down to the bottom and clicked Save

That gave me a massive page about my new custom object, Pitch. I could see SF had created some fields for me: Created By, Last Modified By,  Owner and Pitch ID. I think those are built‐in, what they call “standard fields” in SF. Whatever. I ignored those and just focused on creating the fields for Riley to use. You guessed it—the “custom fields”:

13. I scrolled down to the Custom Fields & Relationships section & clicked on New

Here’s where I had to tell SF about each field I wanted to add, eg. what would be the name (like the column header) and what type of data would be going in there, how many letters or numbers to plan on, etc.

So first off, I knew for every pitch she’s making, she would want to record the name of the business, e.g. the VC firm, that she’s making that pitch to. For each of these businesses, the name would just be text so:

14. For Data Type, I scrolled down to find Text & clicked the circle (“radio button”) to select it

15. Then I scrolled down to the bottom and clicked Next to go on

16. For Field Label, I entered “Business Name” and when I hit my tab key to go to the next slot,  SF automatically filled in the Field Name slot with “Business_Name” (adding the underscore)

17. For Length, I put in the number 40 (figured that should be enough for any business name)

18. I clicked Required (to make sure every pitch record will at least include the business’ name)

19. Then, I scrolled on down and clicked Next

20. That gave me a Step 3 screen about Field Level Security which I ignored & just scrolled down to click Next again

21. Then I got a Step 4 screen about layouts, ignored that stuff again and clicked Save & New to start again with the next field to add

(BTW, as I was adding these fields, I messed up a couple of times and got lost & I kind of panicked. But it turns out, it’s ok b/c if that happens, all the stuff you saved is still there and you can just get back into adding fields again, just like before, to finish off. No worries.)

Anyway…it was time for another custom field. This time I wanted to add a field to say what kind of investor was being pitched—a VC or an “angel.” Since there were only two possible values to fill in for this field, I found a data type, “Picklist” that would let me set up a list for Riley to choose from for that field so she wouldn’t have to type it out each time:

22. This time, for Data Type, I selected Picklist (not Multi) & then clicked Next like before

23. For Field Label, I entered “Type” (to save which type, VC or Angel, for each Pitch)

24. Then, just below Field Label, next to Values, I clicked the Enter values, with each value separated by a new line. option & that opened a textbox where I typed “VC” on the 1st line & then hit Enter & typed “Angel” on the 2nd line

25. Then, like before I clicked Next, then Next again and then Save & New to add another field

I figured she would want to record the name of her contact at that company, of course, and a single field would do (no need to make any more Required, like I did for Business Name):

26. For Data Type, I selected Text & clicked Next

27. For Field Label, I entered “Contact Name”

28. Length: 30

29. Then, like before I clicked Next, then Next again and then Save & New to add another field

Obviously, she would want to keep track of the contact info for her contact at each business she’s pitching and fortunately, SF has a special data type that formats phone number like it should, automatically. So I created another new field this way:

30. Data Type: Phone

31. Next

32. Field Label: “Mobile”

33. Next, Next, Save & New

Then, turns out there’s special data type for email address fields too, so:

34. Data Type: Email 

35. Next

36. Field Label: “Email” (less typing than “Email Address” & the “Address” part is obvious)

37. Next, Next, Save & New

Then, I remembered, at each company she pitched, she wanted to keep track of the dollar amount that they discussed possibly investing. I knew I could put that in a text field but then I realized she might want to do something with the number values later on. Like she might want to add up the total amount for all pitches or display all the pitches that talked about amounts over $200k or something. I remember Prof said if you type numbers into a text field, then they’re just like letters, etc.—you can’t do math on them. So I looked for a good number‐based option to use and found SF has a currency field type. Made it big enough for multi‐million deals (hah), just in case:

38. Data Type: Currency 

39. Next

40. Field Label: “Investment Amount”

41. Length: 12

42. Decimal places: 2

43. Next, Next, Save & New

And I knew since they were talking about the amount they might invest, then they would also be talking about the percentage of equity (remember that’s the share of ownership they get for their investment) so I added:

44. Data Type: Percent 

45. Next

46. Field Label: “Equity Percentage”

47. Length: 3

48. Decimal places: 1

49. Next, Next, Save & New

In another flash of brilliance, it occurred to me that the date of the pitch might be important & there’s a built‐in date type for just such occasions:

50. Data Type: Date

51. Next

52. Field Label: “Pitch Date”

53. Next, Next, Save & New

I guessed she would want to keep track of a date to follow up with them after the initial meeting too so I added:

54. Data Type: Date

55. Next

56. Field Label: “Follow Up”

57. Next, Next, Save & New

And she’d said she wanted to be able to type in a few personal comments on each business, to remind her how things went. Looking at the data type options, “Text Area (Long)” and “Text Area (Rich)” seemed like overkill. But plain old “Text Area” with its 255 characters seemed just right.

58. Data Type: Text Area 

59. Next

60. Field Label: “Comments”

61. Next, Next and then...WAIT!!!—NOT Save & New this time (b/c I was done with adding fields)—just plain Save this time 

Ok, that wasn’t bad. A custom object (table) with a bunch of custom fields (columns) of all different types and it took...only a few. I was stoked! Then it was like, ok what else do I need to make it an app—something that’s useful and usable to do stuff?

Well, I knew she’d need a data entry screen and voila—I just scrolled down on the Pitch custom object page, and found a section called Page Layouts. SF already created one for me called, amazingly, Pitch Layout. Sweet. Ok, then I tried editing it to make sure it would look nice:

62. I clicked on Edit just to the left of the Pitch Layout name, under Action

So that brought up this page with a toolbar at the top. Then I scrolled down and found a section labelled Pitch Detail with a sample mock up of a basic entry screen below. I saw little lock icons next to those system‐generated fields, like Pitch ID, and next to Business Name there was a red star b/c I made it required and blue dot that means it always has to be on the layout. Totally got it.

But I wanted to see if I could make it look a little better and this was cool—when I put the cursor over a field, it changed to a four‐directional arrow and made some of the background area green and it let me drag and drop the field to wherever I wanted on the green area to change the layout:

So:

63. I pressed down & held on the Contact Name field to drag it over to the right hand column under Owner and then I let go & it stuck there!

64. I did the same to drag Mobile under Contact Name

65. Then I dragged Email under Mobile

66. Next I dragged Follow Up under Email

67. And finally, I dragged Comments under Follow Up

Now, whenever Riley would view a record or enter a new one, the screen layout would have this nice 2‐column look with the stuff she needed for the next meeting grouped together on the right.

I also wanted to hide the system stuff that Riley wouldn’t need—Created By & Last Modified By—so it would look cleaner to her. Turns out it’s easy. Try it. Don’t worry, it’s ok. Promise!

68. I rolled the cursor arrow over the Created By field, just below Pitch Date and a little circle with a minus sign (‐) inside appeared next to a little wrench

69. When I touched the little circle with the minus sign inside, a Remove label popped up to show me what it does—I went ahead and clicked the circle to take that field out of the layout

70. I did the same thing (Steps 68 & 69) for Last Modified By (under Comments)

71. Then, to save the layout changes, I clicked the Save button on the top left of that top toolbar:

Better. Good enough. I knew I could always polish it up more later.

Then I was like, how do I try it out? How do I add data? Then I remembered the tutorial I did before —I’d created a tab for doing this very thing—up there on the row with the Home, Chatter,Campaigns, etc tabs. So then I tried making a tab for Pitches:

72. I clicked on Create (back on the left hand vertical menu, under Build)

73. I selected Tabs under that

74. In the Custom Object Tabs section, I clicked on the New button

75. For Object, I selected Pitch

76. For Tab Style, I clicked on the magnifying glass & selected an icon/color to use. I chose the treasure chest (hehe) but you can choose whatever

77. Next, Next, Save

and there it was at the far right of my tab bar (the light blue bar just below the dark blue banner at the top) next to the row with Home, Chatter, Campaigns, etc:

78. Then, I clicked on my new Pitches tab

79. Then, I clicked on the New button in the center

80. Then, I entered some fake data for each field and clicked Save—there was my first record!

81. Now use the Pitch tab and New button again (just like above) to add three (3) more Pitch records with different fake data (just make up stuff) so you end up with least two (2) different VC firms and 2 angels. We only made Business Name required, remember, that’s why there’s that red bar in that slot. But you should fill in every slot anyway just so they’ll all look like real, complete records. For Investment Amount use numbers between $20,000 and $750,000. For Equity Percentage use values between 5.0% and 90.0%.

Notice you can enter bad phone numbers, like with letters, but it blocks you from entering an email address in the wrong format. As long as the format’s right though, it takes it, even if it’s not a real, working address. Try other fields to see what mistakes SF will/won’t block automatically for you.

So next, I wanted to try out the mobile app on my iPhone to see if I could view the records I’d entered and even add a new pitch record that way, like Riley would. If you have a mobile, then download the free Salesforce1 app (Google Play or iTunes), open it up and follow along on.

82. So, on my iPhone, I tapped the little 3‐bar “hamburger” menu icon on the upper left

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83. Then, it showed me a menu of labelled icons & I had to scroll down and then tap ... More to see the Pitches tab I’d created

84. I clicked on it and...viola—I saw the list of Pitch IDs for the pitch records that I’d just added on my laptop! 

85. But all I could see in the list was the ID numbers. I clicked on one and I saw all the info that I had just entered for that record

The mobile version looked a little different than it did on my laptop. Instead of my nice two‐column layout, the fields were just in a single column. I had to scroll down to see all the data. Anyway, did it really work as a mobile app?

86. At the bottom right corner, I tapped on the blue circle icon with the ... to find the Edit button (turquoise pencil icon). When I tapped that, it let me touch the field values and change them however I wanted.

87. Then after I tapped Save, I went back to my laptop, used the Pitches tab and clicked on the Pitch ID number of the record I had just edited and...I could see the changes there right away. This cloud thing is awesome! (You might have to use your browser’s refresh function to see the update.)

88. Back on my phone, I tapped the left arrow at the top left to get back to the screen listing the Pitch IDs and I tried out the New button at the bottom 

89. I filled in the fields and clicked Save (top right) to create a new Pitch record which then showed up, as expected, on my laptop. This was actually turning out to be fun. (Don’t tell anyone I said that.)

So, last step ‐ I still wanted the Pitches tab on my laptop and on my mobile app to show more than just the IDs when you click on Pitches, so I went back to my laptop and found a way to do it:

90. I clicked on Setup

91. I clicked Create on the left side menu

92. I selected Objects

93. From the list of Custom Objects, I clicked on Pitch

94. I scrolled down to the Search Layouts section

95. I clicked Edit next to the row for Pitches Tab

96. In the Available Fields listbox, I clicked on Business Name & then clicked the arrow under Add to move it over to the Selected Fields listbox (see pic below)

97. I did the same for Type, Investment Amount and Equity Percentage

98. I clicked the Save button

99. Finally, I repeated Steps 95‐98 for the Lookup Dialogs layout that’s also there in the Search Layouts section

100. Then, when I went back to the Pitches tab on my laptop—again (like after Step 78), much better! I could see rows and columns of actual data—looked like a real table.

My phone view was better too. The Business Names showed up with the Pitch IDs so Riley could choose one by name. Way better. Check it out for yourself.

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But then, when I clicked on one to open it up, the fields were still listed in one column. :( Turns out that’s just because of the lack of screen “real estate” on a phone—when I tried it on an iPad, with the larger screen, the two‐column layout worked fine, just like the laptop.

Still, I wanted to add a little more polish before I took a break so I tried this “Compact Layouts” feature that I’d noticed on the Pitch object definitions page. I guessed it was for setting up layouts for small displays, eg, phones, etc. I guessed right:

101. I got back to the Pitch object definitions page (Setup > Create > Objects > Pitch)

102. Scrolled down to the Compact Layouts section and clicked New

103. For Label, I entered “Pitch Essentials for Phone”

104. When I tabbed, the Name field auto‐populated with “Pitch_Essentials_for_Phone”

105. Then under Available Fields listbox, I highlighted Business Name and clicked the Add button to move it over to the Selected Fields listbox

106. Then I did the same for Investment Amount and Equity Percentage since those are the key things to know for each pitch

107. Then I clicked Save

108. On the next page that came up, I clicked Compact Layout Assignment

109. Then on the next page, I clicked Edit Assignment

110. For the Primary Compact Layout pull‐down menu, I selected the layout I’d named Pitch Essentials for Phone

111. Then Save

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Then, when I went to my iPhone and clicked on a specific pitch, behold—there was a nice header at the top of that pitch’s screen, showing the Business Name, Investment Amount and Equity Percentage. Seriously, undeniably, sweet!

Starting to look like a real app—something someone could actually do something...useful with. I thought about Riley sitting in her car, with her phone, in front of some big shot VC company, adding her comments about how the big pitch meeting went, using MY mobile app! Now THAT’S pretty dang distinctive & impressive, you have to admit.

So, in just over an hour, I created a working database app with mobile update & lookup capability and I swear I’m not a geek but...I’m uber‐amped. It’s just...I guess love making this stuff work and SF makes it easy. Plus, Riley’s going to be so blown away. (I hope). Stay tuned...

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