Salesforce Admin Journal: Guide & Gather Feedback Using a Google Form Before Deploying Changes

Hello fellow Salesforce admins!

In this post, I'm going to share a challenge I faced as an admin and the solution I came up with.

Imagine that you've made some changes to your Salesforce org that you'd like users to test - a new visualforce page with a few new fields, for example. You want to easily gather their feedback but the idea of assembling everyone's responses via a bunch of separate email conversations makes you antsy. Plus, you'd like a way to guide them through the testing step by step. 

You want to make it as simple as possible for them to share their comments... because you know that will encourage your testers to actually provide feedback... which will improve the quality of your changes when you roll them out to your entire org.

Now that you've got a good idea of the challenge, here's my solution: Google Forms. 

I created a form that outlined the process for testing and provided a text area for comments at each step. 

It looked similar to this (but with quite a few more screen captures and long text fields):

Now, after my group of testers are done, I can easily review all their feedback in a Google Spreadsheet.

If you'd like to make a copy of this sample Google Form to customize for your feedback-gathering needs, click below:

Note: Clicking on this button will run a custom Google Script that will copy the file to your Google Drive. You'll have to give it permission to run first.

PS - I followed these instructions from the answer from Arun Nagarajan to create the Google Script that allows you to copy the Google Form to your own Drive. Handy dandy!

PPS - I wrote this post on my own without prompting or compensation from any of the software companies involved.

When You Need to Forward 86 Gmail Messages at One Time to Someone

Today, a coworker asked me how to forward 86 emails at once.

While researching how to respond, I discovered that you can set up a filter to forward messages, but it will only apply to emails that you receive after you create the filter. So, that wouldn't work here.

To easily forward a large number of emails all at once, you can use a simple script from Amit Agarwal on labnol.org.

Here is the tutorial that I created for my coworker using Clarify. I used Clarify's HTML option under 'Share this page' to insert the content of my tutorial below.

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How to automatically forward new or existing email messages to another address using Gmail

1. Create a copy of the google spreadsheet with the script.

Click here to create a copy of the google spreadsheet.

2. Fill out the label and address to forward to.

It's a good idea to use a temporary label that you'll create just for this purpose, eg: 'FWDTOJENNA'.

3. Click on 'Gmail Forward' in the Google Doc menu.

4. Click on Initialize.

5. Confirm authorization.

6. Click 'Accept'.

7. In your Gmail inbox, apply the label to all the messages you want to forward.

You can click on the first message to forward and then, while holding down the SHIFT key, click on the last (if you're selecting a series of messages). This will check them all off.

Then click on the label icon (it looks like a tag). Put in the label that you decide to use. Click 'Create new'.

8. Confirm the new label by clicking 'Create'.

9. Go back to the Google Spreadsheet and click 'Start Auto-Forward'.

10. The emails will be forwarded. It'll take a few minutes for a large number of emails.

11. When done, choose 'uninstall'.

This will stop the auto-forwarding of the messages.

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Have you tried this method? or have you discovered an alternative? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.