9. Data Enrichment through Data.com
There’s a mention of data enrichment in the Exam Guide for the Data Management Knowledge area. And so you’re not going to find data enrichment if you do a search and set up. You may even be wondering, well, what do they mean by data enrichment? And that has to do with, in general, with just computer science and It projects and big data. Data enrichment has to do with bringing in data from outside sources. And the way that works in Salesforce is through a service called Data.
Now, if you go into your user record, I’ll go ahead and pull myself up here, and you can set yourself up as a data. com user. Now, several years ago, Salesforce acquired a company that provides contact information for people, and they branded that as Data. com. And it may have been previously called Jigsaw or something like that. I don’t recall exactly. I may be wrong on that. But it’s branded as Data. I’ve heard rumors that it may or may not be going away.
You may or may not hear about Data. com on the advanced admin exam, but I wanted at least speak to it, at least at a high level, and make you aware of it. Is that at the point of time of this recording, you can set yourself up as a Data. com user. You also have a monthly limit, and the wide limit is 600 contact records basically in a month. And all this costs an amount if you had like, an enterprise organization, but it gives you a way of pulling in data and contact information on people with companies.
Basically, it’s publicly accessible information, at least behind a paywall or subscription to Data. There’s a lot of other competing services out there, but this is Salesforce’s own. And so I’ll go ahead and see if I can save myself here or if there’s any limits or blocks on actually enabling myself as a data. com user. So I’ll click Save, and there’s just a warning here that if I take the wide limit of all 600, then that may impact the ability of other users to use data. com. But in this instance, I’m the only real user, so I’m going to take it all. And so now that I’ve made myself a data. com user, let’s look at company information briefly and recognize where this falls in under the licensing of Our.
And so you have your different and various user licenses, and then you’ve got other types of licenses around permission sets and feature licenses. And I believe that Data, it’s either a user license or feature license. It’s feature license. There it is. All right, so feature license, there’s two total licenses available in the free Salesforce account. One is used, one is remaining. But I’m taking up the full allotment of the 600 records per month that you can pull in through Data.
All right, so now let’s look for Data. com and set up. If you search for that, you’ll see under Feature Settings selections for data. com and there’ll be filled mapping licenses and limits, prospector preferences and Prospector users. Let’s look at Prospector users. And as a Data. com user, you have access to Prospector, which there’s a few different guides related to Data. com that I probably should point you to.
And I think some of this is actually only available in Classic. Let me pull up this help article related to Prospector with Prospector. At least an online help at the time of this recording is that it’s available in Salesforce Classic. It also says it’s not available in all. Orgs. And I’m not going to go in depth on setting all this up, but I want to show you a couple of other resources. One is implementation guide for data. com clean. Almost sounds like you’re saying come clean as far as coming clean with the truth, but this is an implementation guide for Data. You can work through that as well if you want to see if you can set up Data. com Clean. And there’s a lot of configuration steps. It’s not a super huge guide, it’s like 17 pages. But you’ve got to configure page layouts for Data Prospector and Data Clean and you can do things on account layouts and I believe contacts and leads as well. And let’s go ahead and pop into some of that. At least go into Object Manager and go to accounts and page layouts.
Let’s look at one of these and see if we can find anything related to Data. Not really. So there would be some done in Brad Street fields and clean status fields. Potentially. So let’s look for those fields then. I was thinking there would be something for related list and it’s been frankly, it’s been six or seven years since I’ve used Data. So there’s a good chance that this may not even appear on the exam, but I want to make you aware of its existence, at least just in case.
So you can have fields related to Dun and Bradstreet here’s. Data. com key. This would be a unique Identifier that Data. com uses. It’s its own ID key, and I’m just adding that to display it in the page layout here. But you’d have to pull this data in from Data. com for it to populate and fully configureate Data. com as well. So let’s look at Clean Status as well. Let’s click save here. Now this is the Account page layout. Let me look at page layout assignments and see okay, so that is the page layout for all accounts, for the system administrator profiles. Let me go to an account now. Let’s see those fields in action.
And remember, we’re talking about data enrichment and that just has to do with external sources and bringing that data in. And in this example, what I think they’re hinting at in the exam guide would be Data. So if we go to the Details tab, we should pull in the DMB company, the Data. com key and then the Clean Status is showing, not compared.
All right, so you can set up preferences for data. com prospector and I just search for preferences and set up here’s where you can respect do not contact preferences for contact records and also set up duplicate preferences. And the reason why it’s important to maybe block creation of duplicates is, as you’ve seen previously, just a few minutes ago, the limit in your free developer account here is 600 records a month.
And so you don’t want to be pulling in new records that count against that limit if you’ve already got them in Salesforce. So you can add accounts, contacts and lead records to Salesforce from the Data. com tab, but by default, records that are already in Salesforce won’t be added again unless you allow duplicates. So you can define your duplicate preferences by allowing duplicates for any of these options here, but I’m just going to leave all this alone and click Cancel.
Now, there was a mention of Data. com tab. I don’t think that’s available in Lightning, and let’s switch to Classic and see if we can find it there. I’m always reticent to record things to where it requires switching to Classic because I know that it’s on the way out the door, but it’s still not fully supported. There’s not full parity between Lightning and Classic, and I know at some point this will be out of date, but hey, that’s the life of the software trainer. It becomes obsolete very quickly. So if Data. com does make an appearance in Lightning at some point, just let me know.
So we’ve gone to Classic and you see we’ve got a couple of tabs here, DMB companies that be done in Bradstreet, but here’s what we’re interested in is Data. Clicking on that, we can search for contact records and accounts, and let’s look for Mark Benioff, one of the co founders of Salesforce. And this is just some straight up data mining capability that Data. com gives you the ability to do. So it’s a very powerful way to build a list as well, frankly, if you’re willing to buy your way into it. And when you know that the connection to Data. com isn’t working right now, please try again later. So I don’t know if that’s just a temporary thing or if it’s just totally blocked by Salesforce all the time in the free developer accounts. I’m not going to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.
But the idea here is that you can find contacts or find accounts and you can pull them into your Salesforce instance from a third party resource. And this is what data enrichment looks like and how it works inside of Salesforce as it relates to at least the Datacom service. And so be sure to check out the implementation guide that I link to and the help articles I’ve linked to as well. And we’ll continue on the next lesson with other things related to data management inside of Salesforce.
10. Data Archiving
We want to discuss data archiving. And you may run into instances inside of salesforce where you need to clean out old data because there are limits to your data storage. And one option is you can export all of your data and your records inside of Salesforce and you can schedule that. Now in the free developer account, such as that which we’re in right now, the data export option is a monthly export. Now this option for export increases to a weekly option in the enterprise level and above of salesforce instances. But if you want like a daily export or hourly, you may need to explore other third party integrations and options or tools. And some of those are open source or free in nature such as Talend.
That’s Talend. And then there’s a lot of other third party tools that require subscription or costs such as Informatica or Boomi or others. And so as you think of archiving your data and the monthly export service in this instance, you’re probably familiar with this if you passed the admin exam. But you can export all records for all objects in your instance and that gives you a series of CSV files contained inside of one or multiple zip files. And you schedule this as well once you select which objects and once you selected the objects we just have include all data. And if we click Start Export, then that will have the export in progress. Now, your mileage may vary as to this working or not in the free salesforce instance. It seems like a lot of times these take either forever to do or sometimes they never run at all in the free developer accounts. But you can schedule exports as well.
Now, other options though, and we’re not going to run through all this, I’m trusting that you’re familiar with this, but I wanted to mention in addition to data export, there are other options as well such as the data loader which you can run that to export records inside your salesforce instance. The data loader is something that’s installed locally on your machine and you can install that on a Windows or Mac. And also there’s a command line interface option to where you can script out things. That’s another way that you can schedule things to run daily or hourly. For example, if you have this running on a server, like a Windows server, you could do batch files to launch your exports of your data or you can just do it manually on demand through the interface of the locally installed interface of the data loader as well.
So the reason that data archival is important and just thinking about the different strategies of that is as with all things in salesforce, there’s always a limit of some sort. Now, with company information, you’ll see a couple of different limits here. There’s used dataspace and used file space. Now file space has to do with attachments. For example, used dataspace would be for your data records and you can view the usage of your used data space to see where your usage is coming into play.
And you see the data storage. In this example, I’ve got five whole megabytes of storage, which is not a lot in the free developer accounts. Salesforce really limits the storage on the free developer account so that you don’t either on purpose or inadvertently just leverage a free developer account to run your business on. They want you to become a paying customer at some point, so they really and truly limit you. And you see the current data usage and the percentage of the whole of this. 464k here is 15% of that. 464k is the opportunity splits and then opportunities. And so you can look at the storage usage to see where there might be opportunities to do some clean up and there’s any number of ways that this can be accomplished. You may want to just totally archive an object if it’s no longer used, for example, and export all the data for that object and then delete it and all of its records. Or I’ve seen instances of where you query in the data loader any records that are more than a year old, export those, save those somewhere on the server, then delete them in Salesforce.
Salesforce also provides other archival services that cost a fee and those are newer and not necessarily on the advanced admin exam. But as far as Manual methodologies of how to archive data, there’s a lot of different ways you can approach this. You could also integrate with third party services or servers. Heroku is one option, that’s a Salesforce owned option. But the main points here as it relates to the exam is that if you’re asked about data archival options, there’s many ways to approach that and it really just depends on the use case in the scenario.
But you want to keep in mind that you can see storage usage on company information. You can see where that usage is happening. You can export your data on a schedule and if it’s something beyond or more frequent than a week, then you’ll need to leverage the app exchange. So any and all of those sorts of scenarios may be represented on the exam. So I wanted you to be prepared for that as well.
