As a longtime Salesforce customer, I have a love/hate relationship with the IdeaExchange. In theory, as a place for us to tell Salesforce what we want to see added or improved on their platform, it rules! In practice, it can be frustrating; sometimes even the ideas you’ve voted on that have gained a ton of traction across the community fail to get prioritized release after release.
The Plan
Well, as much as I can, I’m here to help! For this series of blog posts, I’m taking a look at popular ideas on the IdeaExchange that haven’t been delivered yet, and I’m going to show you how you implement the same (or at least, very similar) functionality as the idea reported, using tools available to you right now.
Since there are a ton of ideas on the IdeaExchange, here’s how I’m going to be filtering/sorting them to make sure I’m focusing on ideas with the largest impact:
- I’m only looking at “open” ideas — the ideas that haven’t been delivered yet and that Salesforce isn’t yet working on.
- I’m refining that filter a bit further, filtering out any open ideas that are “on the roadmap.” In other words, I’ll be focusing on the ideas that Salesforce hasn’t identified as something they’re going to fix/improve in the near future.
- Finally, I’m sorting by “points” to surface the ideas with the most votes to the top… but be forewarned that I’m going to be jumping around a lot. More on that under my filter+sort gif:
To jump directly to the IdeaExchange already filtered and sorted as described, click here.
You’ll Be Jumping Around, You Say?
Just to set expectations, I won’t necessarily be going in order, and there will absolutely be some ideas that I “skip” altogether — i.e. don’t write a blog post for at all. Many of the ideas I fully plan on skipping are the ones where the only “alternate solution” currently available is the problem. Here’s an example:
Consider the idea to allow existing picklist fields to use Global Picklists. Until Salesforce implements this idea, the alternate solution available to admins today is to create a new/separate picklist using a Global Value Set, migrate data from the old picklist to the new one, and then deprecate the old picklist. Since this idea was created to replace that very process, spending a blog post talking through that “alternate solution” doesn’t do anybody much good.
More broadly though, some ideas just have more interesting alternate solutions than others. Those will be the ones getting my attention first.
Okay, Let’s Do This!
With that caveat out of the way, I’m eyeing quite a few popular ideas for which I believe a blog post could be quite useful. I’m so excited to start working through them — stay tuned!
