Everything under the Gear with Shane and Rod

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Rod Dixon, Senior Manager for the Setup Platform, and Shane McLaughlin, Principal Demo Engineer for App Cloud Product Marketing. On this episode, we’re focusing on what you can do to be successful “under the gear” in the setup menu.

Join us to hear about all about the Setup Platform and how it makes life easier, better, and more efficient for Admins everywhere.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rod Dixon and Shane McLaughlin.

What Lead Rob and Shane Under the Gear

Shane’s been at Salesforce for about three years, coming from Solution Engineering where he worked with large energy companies around the Houston area. With Salesforce, he builds the marketing demos. So anytime you see things for the Salesforce platform at a World Tour or Dreamforce he either built it or is running it. He’s the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.

Rod is a Senior Product Manager at Salesforce, primarily responsible for the Setup Experience— everything under the gear menu, and everything regarding setup and configuration of the overall platform. They’re in charge of the Object Manager that’s in the Summer 17 Release, which he’s really excited about. “All the Objects are unified the way that Classic never was,” says Rod, which helps eliminate moments of asking yourself, “Do need to I scroll up or down to get where I want to go?”

What the Object Manager Can Do for You

The Summer Release and Object Manager are a game changer. They’re focused on streamlining the process, making it faster and more efficient while also cleaning up the interface. Where you used to have one page with a large number of subsections, the Object Details, and related lists are now broken up into individual pages. Object Manager also has a dedicated tab, which allows you to get back to where you were much faster, letting you look at your work and quickly make adjustments.

Another huge change they’ve made is to replace pagination with infinite scroll. It might not seem like a big change at first but, combined with the Find in Page feature, you can find anything that would’ve normally appeared on another page, simply by typing it in. Combined with new, more powerful sorting feature, Rod says these changes “provide the ability to quickly filter and locate exactly what you’re looking for.”

A Power User’s Experience with Object Manager

Shane has a lot of experience under the gear in his job making demos, so he can speak to how these changes impact his day-to-day. “This job tends to be churning out a lot of things, more than any regular admin would be doing in terms of creating Objects.”

In the past, even though he tries not to use Classic, he’s had to go back and forth a lot in order to get things done quickly, but switching back and forth was still time-consuming. With the Object Manager, the workflow is so much smoother— he can make a few Fields, look at what he’s made to figure out what to build next, and it’s easy to get back and do that.

Collecting Feedback

How does the Setup Team continue making improvements that they know will have a big impact? “For us getting out and interacting with Admins is extremely important,” Rod says, “We want to hear from and interact with Admins as much as possible to see how we can improve the overall experience.”

They use everything they can to try to and capture anything that might be helpful: Chatter, Twitter, Idea Exchange, Communities, and more. As Rod puts it, “All roads come into the Setup Organization and provide us input to figure out what direction we need to take.” Everything under the Gear is really focused on convenience, so they’re always looking for new ideas for what can help Admins do things easier and faster.

For more insights, make sure to follow Shane on Twitter (@mshanemc), or find him and Rod on the Success Community.

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