First, Arnt Hearing led a great demonstration of how to create Validation Rules to keep your data clean. One example he presented was creating a rule that when an opportunity’s stage is “Closed Lost”, it cannot be saved without also choosing a “Lost Reason” field, such as “price too high”.

Along the way, Eric Kintzer reminded us that the Winter ’09 release includes new Logical Operators, such as && (AND) and || (OR). Very handy to use when creating those Validation Rules! Another tip Eric provided was Apex must be used to write validation rules against multi-select picklists (as of Spring ’09).

Second, Arnt and Pete presented how CRMfusion’s DemandTools product can be used to “MassChange” your data and find matching records and merge them. Utilizing DemandTools to look at any standard or customer object and based on pre-defined or custom criteria you can identify hundreds of records across thousands all in minutes. For the mass impact example they looked at finding all the Accounts with a NULL Territory and then updating the Territory to the Owner’s Territory. This example showed the usefulness of cross-object lookups.

We ran out of time to present Sharing Rules. A topic for another day!

The Web conference was enabled by a product from iLinc. This allowed for great interaction among the 16 or so attendees – multiple presenters, application sharing, chat, video, and surveys were all part of the webinar. You can contact Barry Duncan if you’re interested at bduncan @ iLinc.com or 602.718.1592.  He has a user community discount.

If you missed it, the entire webinar was recorded and is available here https://sfug.ilinc.com/join/xvtzvzh.

The next webinar is cancelled since we'll be having our meeting on the 21st of May. The next webinar will be on June 18th.

(blog authored by Bryan B. and Pete F.)