Steven
Welch

Dreamforce is back in San Francisco, and it’s shaping up to be the biggest one yet. Three days at Moscone Center, tens of thousands of Trailblazers, and a full week of keynotes, product news, and parties packed into the streets of SoMa. If you’re heading out for it, this guide covers what you need to … Continued

What is Salesforce Data Export? Salesforce data export refers to the process used to export data from Salesforce, extracting records, files, and metadata from a Salesforce org. The main purpose for this export data would be either data backup, migration, analysis, or some other usage type outside of the core platform.  Businesses tend to start … Continued

Salesforce doesn’t fail because of bad CRM strategy. It fails because of what’s underneath it: messy data, manual workarounds, and tools bolted on without a plan. This article breaks down the categories that matter, compares fifteen of the market’s top solutions, and gives you a real framework for building a stack that fits your team … Continued

Ai4 is North America’s largest conference built around the applied, real-world side of AI. It’s not a research conference, and it’s not built around one vendor’s product roadmap. It’s where business executives, technology leaders, and vendors across every industry show up to compare notes on what’s actually working when you try to put AI into … Continued

What actually separates GRAX and Odaseva is not which one can be a more reliable solution for creating Salesforce backups – since both can do that well. What’s important is what happens to said data after the fact. GRAX was created to put backed-up and archived data to active use in analytics, AI, and reporting. … Continued

As Salesforce environments continue to grow in volume and complexity, the need for tools to protect sensitive information, maintain compliance, and manage and deploy data has never been this important. A compliance gap or failed deployment can cost businesses far more than money; it can waste time and even cost them their credibility. This is … Continued

Ask five people on your Salesforce team what “data migration” means and you’ll get five different answers. One person describes a sandbox refresh. Another means a full org cutover. Somebody, somewhere, uses “migration” and “sync” like they’re interchangeable. They’re not, and that mix-up is the expensive one. This isn’t really a vocabulary problem. It’s a … Continued

Salesforce data drives far more than CRM workflows. It informs executive decisions, supports regulatory compliance, powers customer-facing applications, and feeds the analytics that the whole business depends on. But the value of that data is directly tied to how current it is, and that is where a lot of organizations quietly hit a wall. Most … Continued

For companies operating across borders, data residency is not an abstract compliance concern. It shapes how systems get built, how teams work, and how much regulatory risk the business is carrying at any given moment. In China specifically, the requirements are strict, the enforcement is real, and the consequences of getting it wrong are significant. … Continued

Three months. That is how far back Salesforce’s native historical trend reporting goes. For a sales team trying to understand whether a deal that slipped last quarter reflects a pattern or an anomaly, that window closes fast. Leadership wants to know what changed, when it changed, and why the forecast looked different two quarters ago. … Continued

Customer records, financial information, sales pipelines, employee data — Salesforce routinely stores some of the most sensitive information an organization deals with. As such, the sheer scale and interconnected nature of it turns Salesforce data protection into a business-critical priority, not a simple compliance checkbox. Having a firm grasp of the risks, trust implications, and … Continued

Regulatory compliance in financial services is not a checkbox exercise. Broker-dealers managing client data, communications, and transaction records in Salesforce face real consequences when their recordkeeping infrastructure does not hold up under examination. FINRA Rule 4511 sits at the center of those obligations, and firms that underestimate its reach tend to find out the hard … Continued

What Is Salesforce Backup and Why Does It Matter? Salesforce backup refers to the creation and archiving of organizational records, configuration settings, and metadata so that it can be recovered after being lost or corrupted. Salesforce backups can span across objects, relationships, and system settings that define how exactly a Salesforce environment (org) functions. What … Continued

Managing permissions in Salesforce may seem like a breeze at first, but it doesn’t take long to realize it’s actually a complex task. As soon as you encounter your first unusual situation, things start to get confusing. You’re left wondering who has access to what, and how they got it. The problem is, when you … Continued

What is a Salesforce Data Retention Policy? A data retention policy in Salesforce can be defined as a formal framework governing how long different data types are going to be retained within a Salesforce platform before being archived, anonymized, or deleted. The policy applies to standard and custom objects, files, and integrated systems — all … Continued

The vast majority of Salesforce data is heavily underutilized, being stuck inside the CRM with limited querying options, problematic joining with other sources, and restricted via API limits that make most large-scale analyses impractical. Moving that Salesforce data into Snowflake allows it to be used for advanced analytics among other use cases. However, the integration … Continued

In a world where data is a competitive advantage, businesses need full access and ownership over their Salesforce data. While Salesforce’s Data Cloud offers a zero-copy approach to data sharing, and the Snowflake zero-copy clone feature allows for instant replication of Snowflake data without duplicating storage, organizations also need flexible solutions to seamlessly bring external … Continued

What is GDPR and how does it apply to Salesforce? The General Data Protection Regulation mandates binding rules for organizations when it comes to how they are supposed to acquire, store, and process the personal data of individuals in the European Union. Businesses that use Salesforce cannot opt out of GDPR compliance, since the platform … Continued

What is Salesforce data analytics and why does it matter? Salesforce data analytics is the process of analyzing, interpreting, and acting on the CRM data stored in Salesforce to drive smarter business decisions. The data that organizations build up in Salesforce is some of their most precious and, in many cases, most underutilized business assets. … Continued

Welcome to the world of Salesforce data protection, where safeguarding your Salesforce data is key to business continuity. Two leading players in Salesforce data management are GRAX and Own. Backing up and recovering critical Salesforce data is crucial, and there are lots of solutions available. But how do you choose the best one for your … Continued

If you ask any Salesforce admin about the project they dislike the most, you’ll likely get a similar response: migrating data. It’s not that the tools are inadequate, they’re actually quite good, but more so that the risks are high and there’s little room for mistakes. When the data is imported correctly, the CRM functions … Continued

Most life sciences organizations didn’t put “rethink our CRM platform” on their strategic agenda for the year. The Veeva Salesforce split put it there anyway.  And for a lot of these organizations, it’s not a small thing to work through. It’s not just a version upgrade or a feature migration. It’s a change to the … Continued

CapStorm Technology Now Part of GRAX I’ll work my way to “What is CopyStorm” but what I want to start with is: Most of our customers can achieve 3–5 minute replication windows for analytics and reporting purposes in near real-time. When it comes to managing your business’s critical data, Salesforce is the clear leader, enabling … Continued

When teams talk about backup and disaster recovery in Salesforce, RPO and RTO come up constantly. But in practice, they’re often misunderstood, or worse, assumed. You’ll see vendors claim “point-in-time recovery,” but only run backups once per day. That leaves you exposed to nearly a full day of potential data loss. And when something actually … Continued

What Is the Salesforce Recycle Bin and Why Does It Exist? If you work in Salesforce long enough, you’ll eventually delete something you didn’t mean to. Sometimes it’s a single record. Sometimes it’s thousands. Either way, that moment of “we need that back” happens more often than most teams would like to admit. The Salesforce … Continued

Picking a Salesforce edition feels like a licensing decision. In practice, it’s closer to an architectural one, and most organizations don’t realize that until they’re already locked in. For the first year or two, the gaps between editions are mostly invisible. Deals get tracked, reports get pulled, the team moves on. Then someone tries to … Continued

Salesforce TDX 2026 is almost here, and if you work anywhere in the Salesforce ecosystem as a developer, admin, architect, or partner – the next few weeks deserve a spot on your radar.  Two days of intensive technical learning, hands-on sessions with the engineers actually creating the products you use, and participating in the community … Continued

In 2021, the average cost of a data breach hit a 17 year high. Last year, every data breach cost companies approximately $3.86M per incident. The current average is roughly $4.24M per data breach. Recently, representatives from top technology companies, including Google, Okta, Slack, and Salesforce, have created a partnership to develop a cybersecurity baseline. … Continued

If you’re evaluating Salesforce Shield, you’ve probably already hit the wall where native Salesforce security feels insufficient. Maybe compliance came knocking. Maybe legal asked a question about field-level data history that nobody could answer. Maybe your security team flagged that sensitive data sitting in Salesforce wasn’t encrypted at rest, and suddenly that felt less acceptable … Continued

How Are Veeva and Salesforce Connected? The shared architectural history of Veeva and Salesforce is profound – a history that defined how life science companies built their commercial capabilities for more than a decade. This shared history should be well understood before deciding on any data migration actions. What is Veeva in Salesforce and how … Continued

Most organizations are under the impression that they own their Salesforce data.  From their point of view, their teams are logging in every day for things like generating reports or updating dashboards. Looking at things through a practical standpoint, everything feels controlled. But ownership and access are not the same thing, and knowing the difference … Continued

A Salesforce data incident typically refers to any event that corrupts, deletes, overwrites, or misaligns Salesforce records, metadata, or object relationships. These incidents can be triggered by deployments, user errors, integrations, or schema changes. Understanding how they happen is the first step toward preventing them. Many Salesforce data incidents begin with what looks like a … Continued

Salesforce has become an essential customer relationship management (CRM) platform for businesses, aiding them in establishing strong connections with their customers. However, due to the large amount of data stored in Salesforce, it is crucial to ensure its security and integrity. With options ranging from Salesforce’s native solutions to specialized platforms like Own and GRAX … Continued