Audit9 Blog

The Audit9 Blog provides content for Architects, Developers and ISVs with a technical interest in the Salesforce cloud platform and ecosystem.

Blog authored by Mark Cane, Salesforce Certified Technical Architect. All views expressed are mine and mine alone. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only.

Salesforce Spring ’14 Highlights

After a short period of blindly exploring a pre-release Spring ’14 org, the release notes are now available. With Salesforce1 released recently it’s unsurprising that Spring ’14 isn’t a significant release in terms of new features and that a lot of the highlights are currently at Pilot status. I expected a low-key release with incremental […]

Integration Architecture Patterns

As an architect I’m generally obsessive about three things; patterns, principles and practices. I could probably add to this list but I also prefer to keep things simple. This post is concerned with the first P, Patterns – in the integration architecture context. At what level should they be defined and applied? I tend to […]

Salesforce Platform Limits – Designing for Scale

A Salesforce instance is a constrained environment where limits exist in respect to capacity and execution. Examples of capacity limits being data storage, number of active users, number of custom objects/custom fields/picklists etc. examples of execution limits being API calls per 24-hour period, SOQL queries executed within an Apex transaction, Viewstate size in Visualforce pages […]

Salesforce Certified Architect – Value Proposition

A real challenge for all Salesforce Architects is keeping up-to-date on the constantly evolving native platform capabilities and customisation/extension points. It’s a truism that nothing stands still, this is especially true in the Salesforce world, with 3 releases a year, frequent off-cycle incremental feature enhancements, acquisitions etc. etc.. This constant evolution is of course great […]

Two-Factor Authentication

Winter ’14 introduces two-factor authentication (2FA) for both User Interface and API logins, a long-awaited security feature enabled through User Profile, or Permission Set. The relevant permissions are: Two-Factor Authentication for User Interface Logins Two-Factor Authentication for API Logins The second factor in question being a time-based token generated by a Salesforce supplied, device specific […]

Salesforce to Salesforce – A Short Case Study

First of all let me be clear on one thing, I’m a big advocate for Salesforce-to-Salesforce, for many org-to-org data convergence/integration use cases S2S is an efficient, cost effective solution. Over the last couple of years I’ve had the pleasure to work with a non-profit organisation, via the Salesforce foundation, on an interesting use case […]

Winter 14 Embedded Analytics

Super quick post on Embedded Analytics just in case this has passed anyone by and because it’s probably my favourite non-technical new feature for some time. In short, it is now possible to embed two charts (not reports) into a standard page layout (custom objects and standard objects), blurring the lines slightly between layouts and […]

Salesforce Analytics API

With Winter ’14 the new Analytics API turns GA. This RESTful style of API consumes standard API call limits, uses OAuth authentication and JSON request/response message formats (representations). The key functionality of the Analytics API is the execution of reports (in synchronous or asynchronous modes), the application of dynamic filtering and the inspection of report […]

Salesforce Winter 14 – Platform

Slightly depressing to be saying this in late August but Winter is almost upon us in the shape of the Winter ’14 (or v29.0) release. The Winter ’14 release notes are now available, find below a brief introduction to 10 Force.com highlights (in no order of significance). 1. Increased Sandbox Storage Limits. Developer sandboxes now […]