Salesforce encyclopedia (Q-U)

Q as Quip

“One for all, all for one.”. What do the Three Musketeers and their well-known motto have in common with the tool called Quip? Quip, to put it briefly, is software used to work with documents. A slightly changed Musketeers’ motto, that is, “One for all”, perfectly gives the gist of what Quip is. A document, spreadsheet, or slide can be the “one” regardless of the document type. Such a document can be shared with the whole team to collaborate at the same time.

Not only can each authorized user view the document, but also they can edit it, comment on it, and more. In addition, the software offers another useful option – the team can work on the document in the chat assigned to it. One workspace focused on one subject allows avoiding mess and searching for comments left by different users in different parts of the document.

Why do we mention that in the Salesforce Encyclopedia? Because Quip and Salesforce are one thing, and more precisely, it’s the same family (Salesforce bought Quip in 2016). For users, it literally means that if the company uses Salesforce, for example, the sales department uses Sales Cloud, it can also use Quip since it’s one of the Sales Cloud functionalities. Each activity in the Quip document is also carried out in the Sales Cloud window. Thanks to this, the data is synchronized, and as a result, it ensures that work is done using current data from CRM. Apart from that, when a salesperson wants to use a Quip document, they do not have to leave the Sales Cloud window; therefore, they don’t waste time switching between the working environments and don’t lose context.

Ready-to-use document templates for common processes are available in Quip, but the tool also enables the creation of new, custom-made templates.

R as release

Salesforce users’ lives follow the seasons of the year. Not a very revealing statement because your life also follows this rhythm, although you haven’t used Salesforce (yet :)), have you? But only Salesforce users get the free system update three times a year – at the beginning of spring, summer, and winter. Although it’s a seasonal event, it has nothing in common with the weather forecast. An update, that is, a release, means that new features appeared in the system – those that are completely new, announced, or partially implemented, and it’s time to continue implementing the changes that have been developed. When Salesforce goes through the seasonal makeover, all the Salesforce-based applications also go through this process automatically and without any additional charge for customers worldwide. This is called a global venture!

For the first time, the latest update – Spring ‘22 Release – also covered new features on Slack. It’s a platform that joined the Salesforce family in 2020. You can find the details of each update on salesforce.com – it had 142 pages recently. Our customers can find those details in their mailboxes, however, in a much shorter version. We send them the description of those updates that are, in our opinion, the most important.

S as self-discipline

What entry should you choose starting with the letter “S” when you work on a guide to Salesforce? This letter offers many opportunities, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud – they are one of the top cloud-based Salesforce solutions along with the aforementioned Slack. Or perhaps, S as Salesforce? 🙂 The right time will come for those entries in the next parts of this encyclopedia. Right now, I’ve chosen something that doesn’t seem to be that obvious. However, it is obvious and even necessary when you use CRM (not only Salesforce CRM). Namely, it’s self-discipline, but to make it sound less harsh, it’s rather diligence – in entering information.

We have already written about this on our blog and in our guide – the IT system can do everything for you (well, almost everything) if you feed it with up-to-date information. This is one of those activities that Salesforce can’t help you with but, obviously, can facilitate this to a greater extent. CRM is a database; therefore, all processes take place around it and are based on it. Everything starts from the database. Salesforce can process a massive amount of data at a very fast pace (at the letter “T”, I write about its analytical capabilities), but, first, it has to have some data that can be processed.

T as Tableau

I suppose that even if each of us has never tried out visualization on ourselves, at least you heard about it. It’s a kind of mental training – it’s popular, for example, among athletes (and recommended by psychologists regardless of physical training).

Visualization can help us with various areas of life. However, there is one area in which you should let your mind unwind, and that should be taken care of by business intelligence systems – it’s data visualization. Tableau is this type of system – it’s a tool that belongs to the Salesforce family (since 2019). According to the Gartner report (we have written about this company in our encyclopedia before), for the ninth time, Tableau became a leader among business intelligence tools.

Why should you trust the program instead of yourself? It’s not a matter of choice, but a necessity. Visualizations created by Tableau are beyond the reach of our possibilities. They attract your attention, but it’s not about the looks. It’s about the humongous amount of data hidden behind the colorful charts, whose manual analysis would take… Well, how long would it take, and would it be possible? Tableau can identify data sources commonly used in the business. It retrieves data from those sources in real time (it can connect to any database). In addition, it responds to queries made in real time; in other words, it creates new combinations of data – it’s enough that a user makes several movements on the screen.

U as user permissions

We are gradually coming to the end of this article. It’s great that you follow our blog. I hope you’re among regular readers. I’m writing “reader”, but a developer would probably say that you’re the end user of the system that inspired us to build our blog and website. As a user, you visit our website and read articles. However, if you were reading one of our articles and the following thought came to your mind “I would have written it differently,” you can’t just make corrections – because you can’t edit content. Things you can do on our website (or anywhere else in the online world) result from the fact that, as an end user, you were granted specific permissions.

I guess that, as an end user of various systems, you don’t think about it, you just use them. Why do I bring up this subject? Because, at some point, you can be involved in the implementation of the IT system, and it can be Salesforce. Perhaps, you will have to decide who can use it and under what conditions, who can be granted greater permissions, and who needs to have those permissions restricted? We have several tips for you on what best solution in the area of permissions we advise our customers to use. I encourage you to read this article – How to build a permission model in Salesforce?

If you are not familiar with the previous parts of the Salesforce Encyclopedia, start with Salesforce Encyclopedia A-H.