Admins

Org Confessions – Salesforce Horror Stories from Admins

By Ben McCarthy

Salesforce has a bit of a juxtaposition when it comes to the ability to customise your Org. It’s so intuitive to create fields, automation, profiles, security settings etc, that anyone can do it, and they do!

Org Confessions has been set up by our friends over at Elements.cloud for Admins and Consultants to anonymously detail some of the “Org Horrors” they’ve seen. The submissions are worrying, anxiety-provoking, and hilarious. Here are a few of our top picks…

Org Confessions

Confession #1

“We’ve maxed out our field limit on a Task. Let that just sink in for a minute.”

At least the Org is nice and lean. Everything in one place…

Confession #17

“738 Apex triggers developed over the last 8 years by external consultants. No documentation.”

Come on Consultants…you’re meant to be the experts!

Confession #24

“Profile for every user.”

Now that is high maintenance…

Confession #25

“All business process and data for a 40-user company was on the same standard object.”

Seems to be a new trend? Is there a best practice I haven’t heard about yet?

Confession #26

“Every user is a system administrator.”

This happens more often than you think… see also #58, #60, #122, #130, #162, #185 & #198. 

Confession #38

“1000 users but 5000 roles.”

I’m not going to even begin guessing how this happened.

Confession #48

“Lead Source values maxed out with 1,000 entries.”

Someone needs to discover the Campaign object.

Confession #53

“Using i++ to increase code coverage of test classes unethically.”

Just no…See also #221, #224, #51

Confession #65

“We created a custom Opportunity object because we didn’t like the name “opportunity” and now we can’t build a sales pipeline report easily.”

If only you knew that you could rename tabs!

Confession #96

“9 Triggers on Lead Insert.”

Trigger best practices 101

Confession #105

“For a large telecommunications business I was asked to add a checkbox to a page, then make it required.”

This must be fun for the users.

Confession #121

“A Solo Admin has developed the Org for the last 8 years. They have just left but there is no documentation on any of the changes. So now the new team of 3 people is trying to work out what was done and why.”

You must feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes?

Confession #125

“I inherited an org which had the sales team using a custom object for Leads… because another team was already using Leads to track their opportunities. Because obviously, two teams couldn’t use the same object for similar purposes… I blew their minds with record types!”

Imagine what else you could teach them?!

Confession #136

“Org 62.”

Blasphemy!

Confession #169

“User did the MyDomain Trailhead in Production. So our Prod login was changed to kittiesarecute.my.salesforce.com It took a tech call escalated to Salesforce Tier 3 support to undo.”

And the winner goes to…

Confession #177

“Brand new Admin. Accidentally deleted 3 million records, so spent all weekend re-importing them before anyone noticed.”

Always take backups, people…

Confession #207

“Former accidentals admins would test in production and now there are 782 custom fields on the Account object. I should have looked at the org before accepting the job.”

A lesson for everyone interviewing as an Admin…

Confession #218

“I inherited the “simple” org with 39 different record types, and 290 Lead routing rules for Call Center with about 350 active agents, almost rule per agent.”

What a personalised experience for each agent.

Confession #226

“250k+ Contacts related to same Account. It takes approx. 1 minute for the Account to load and 3 minutes to merge Contacts. Plus, reports are very slow.”

Why on earth would you do that?!

Confession #230

“Formula field “Today__c” exists on various objects. The formula is simply “TODAY()””

I haven’t heard of this best practice before?

Please add your horror stories – anonymously.  We can all learn from other people’s misfortune.  And if we can get to 500 confessions, the Elements.cloud team are talking about printing a book!

The Author

Ben McCarthy

Ben is the Founder of Salesforce Ben. He also works as a Non-Exec Director & Advisor for various companies within the Salesforce Ecosystem.

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