These are some key terms that you may hear as you work with the Salesforce team and their meaning.  

Salesforce Object: A Salesforce Object is, in a simple sense, a holding area for specific information. This information could be Account data, Contact information, Cases, Campaigns (Marketing), or any other grouping that is created specifically to categorize and store IPRO information.  Think of an object as a tab on a spreadsheet. 

There are two types of Salesforce Objects, Standard and Custom.

Standard Objects: The objects that Salesforce supplies for every organization. Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, Campaigns, Reports, Dashboards, Tasks & Activities are all examples of Standard Objects.

Custom Objects: Custom objects are customized and created by IPRO to store data that does not fit into the categories provided by Standard Objects. An example of an IPRO Custom Object is Payments.

Record: A record is a digital file that stores all the pertinent information about a single entity assigned to an object. Think of it as a row on a spreadsheet that holds all the vital information about the object it’s on. For example, if we were to create an Account Record for IPRO, it would contain the Account Name, Mailing Address, Company Phone Number, Website, and perhaps indicate the type of business – Non-profit.

Record Type: Record types are a way to organize or group data into similar categories for an object. This grouping allows each Record Type to have different page layouts, display different fields, provide visibility limits to specific permission groups, and have different pick-list options available.

Fields: A field is a specific piece of data that is found on an object record. This could be a name, an Account billing address, a Contact phone number, or any other piece of information used to identify or provide detailed information about an object record.

Activities: This object, also sometimes referred to as Tasks/Events, records daily interactions with Accounts and Contacts. These could be tasks, events, emails, phone calls or any other type of interaction IPRO might have with a client.

Reports: Reports allow the User to pull data from any other object or multiple objects within Salesforce and show how it relates or aggregates to a specific criteria. Reports can be viewed as simple columns and rows, summed, bucketed, filtered, and grouped in multiple ways.

Dashboard: The Dashboard object allows the data from one or more reports to be graphically displayed in a single location. Dashboards can be set to be viewed as a common User, or to be viewed specifically as the Current User.

Validation Rule: This is a set of requirements that need to be followed before an action is taken. Examples of validation rules are “no special characters in Name fields”, “One method of contact; email, phone or address, on a Contact record”. These rules will run in the background and only notify a user if the validation is not met.

App:  This is a set of fields, objects, permissions and functionality that is created to support a business process.  Each business area has an app they use to perform their work.  The app controls how information collected across all IPRO business areas is displayed and used by a specific business area.