You can schedule a time based workflow that fires every month. If that doesn't work, you can leverage the APEX class to send the email.

QUE

why opportunities' and contracts' notes and attachments also are showed under account? any way we can make notes and attachments under Opportunities are not visible under Accounts?

ANS

When a user creates a Note or Attachment, there is a Private checkbox they can use.

Follow button in Salesforce Chatter !

Question

Can we by any chance use the 'Follow' button in Salesforce Chatter to send an invite to people to connect apart from its standard functionality of following people and get their regular updates/feeds?

Answer

The follow feature of Chatter doesn't really offer any options to configure - certainly nothing along the lines of what you are describing such as sending an invite.

To do what you want you would have to use quite a considerable amount of customisation using Apex and Visualforce. 

How to write validation Rule for casecomment?

Question

 

I want to write validation Rule for case comments. SO if any users wants to delete/update  the case comments then it wont allowed deletion or modification. But i saw that there is no field like comments in the case fields. Then how could i acheive this ?

 

 

 

Answer 

 

trigger trgr_Case_CaseCommentLock on CaseComment (before Update, before Delete) {
    
    List<Profile> currentUserProfile = new List<Profile>();
    
    currentUserProfile = 
        [SELECT Name FROM Profile WHERE Id = :UserInfo.getProfileId() LIMIT 1];
    
    if(
        !currentUserProfile.isEmpty() &&
        currentUserProfile[0].Name != 'System Administrator'
    )
        if(trigger.isDelete)
            for(CaseComment cm : trigger.old)
                cm.addError('You cannot Delete a Case Comment!');
        else
            for(CaseComment cm : trigger.new)
                cm.addError('You cannot Edit a Case Comment!');        
}

Help with Opportunity Products Field

Question

I have created a field at the Product level, but when quotes are created the products in the opportunity are Opportunity Products. These Opportunity  Product then do not have the same fields as the simple Products do, so my new field in Products is not showing up, thus my Opportuntiy field does not work

Is their a way to update Opportunity Products rather than just Products? Or, will I need to configure some sort of cross-object flow to communicate the 'Year' from Products to Opportunity Products.

Answer

Create custom formula field on Opportunity Product (setup-customize-opportunity-opportunity product-fields).
In that custom formula put value of that product field you have already created. Formula will be something like this PricebookEntry.Product2.your_field_on_product .

Receive data from external software?

Question

I work with a piece of software that collects data about my customer's activity on an ongoing basis.

In a recent conversation with the software vendor, the told me that other customers have created an integration between the software and SFDC by supplying the software vendor with an endpoint address (within the SFDC org) to which they can send data, and then setting up a mapping that points the data from the software vendor to specific SFDC fields.
 

Does anyone have any idea what they are talking about?  Where can I find this address?  It sounds almost like an FTP.

Has anyone had any experience with pulling in data from external sources on a regular basis?

Answer

What they are talking about is setting up/creating your own web service inside Salesforce that you can then expose and make available to external systems. Example of a simple web service here (http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_web_services_methods.htm" target="_blank).

When you make that class and define it as a Web Service, there will be a button to generate a WSDL from the class when you look at it in Salesforce.


When you generate that WSDL, all the way at the bottom there will be a URL like "https://na13.salesforce.com/services/Soap/class/MyWebService". This is what the external system calls to connect with your system. The external system will also need a username/pw to authenticate and connect to your Salesforce.

Once it is connected, the external service can call the methods inside your web service. For instance, in the example provided they could pass a name and accountid to your system and call makeContact() to generate a new contact on that account inside Salesforce.

Find Percent of Value by Row Grouping

Q
How do I find the percent of a total value grouped by row? I've tried the PARENTGROUPVAL but I don't think I'm using it correctly.

I have a report summing up the Account field "Total Contracted Revenue" for all Customers, broken down into rows by Industry. I want to know what percentage of the Grand Total TCV each Industry has. The chart feature easily allows me to do this ("Show %") but I can't figure out the formula to get this into my report.


So basically, for each row (Industry), I want to know what percentage of the report's Grand Total TCV (Total_Revenue_Received_from_Customer__c) each one has.

Ans

AMOUNT:SUM /PARENTGROUPVAL(AMOUNT:SUM, GRAND_SUMMARY)

Sorting related list by hidden field

Question

I have a simple logic which defines the sorting order of a related list, but it's not a VERY simple one like alphabetically of ascending/descending.
I defined an additional field to capture this logic, and i want to sort the related list according to this field, but not to show this field on the layout.
Any ideas?

Answer

I don't think you'll be able to sort without displaying the field unless you use some Visualforce, which sounds like it might be more work than what you want to do. The documentation on related lists says that sorting is only available by selecting the field you want to sort on from the list of fields shown and selecting ascending/descending. (http://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=customizing_related_lists.htm&language=en_US" target="_blank)

I know space is a premium, but you can just stick it at the end of the related list and sort, and hopefully your users won't mind too much.