Who is ready for #MOARBADGERS?!!! WE ARE!!!

On Wednesday, July 13th, the Salesforce Trailhead team introduced 3 new badges and a new Help Customers Faster with Desk.com Trail.

Security is on everyone’s minds these days, especially if you are in an industry that is highly regulated, containing the kind of data that requires extra security and Salesforce Classic Encryption just won’t cut it and Shield Platform Encryption is what s needed.

The three units walkthrough the definition of encryption and how it protects data; differences between Classic Encryption (free!) and Shield Platform Encryption (paid add-on); how tenant secrets, keys and master secrets work together; the system permissions needed to create/manage the tenant keys, encrypt the fields or files/attachments. Lastly, but most important, this defines the best practices before enabling Shield Platform Encryption in the org. Do not go wild and encrypt everything! Your company must determine its threat model, create a data classification scheme and only encrypt that which is really necessary (that which is truly sensitive). I really cannot stress this enough. Thank you, Trailhead for calling this out. Test Shield out in a sandbox thoroughly, executing all processes, all apps/integrations in and out of Salesforce to ensure all is working as expected before rolling this out into Production. Don’t forget to protect the keys by really restricting access to those who can manage the encryption settings, but more importantly, those who can create/manage the encryption keys.

You can practice the implementation with a challenge against your developer org.

 

The Help Customers Faster with Desk.com is the newest trail to join the Trailhead family for beginner Admins. It consists of two modules: Desk.com Basics and the Desk.com Toolkit.

In the Desk.com Basics Module, you learn about what Desk.com is, what it offers to your business and why you would use Desk.com versus the Service Cloud. You can play around Desk.com by signing up for a trial of Desk.com – another cool way to learn other functionality. The module also walks you through the differences between the Admin and Agent consoles, Classic and Next Gen Agent consoles, how to navigate within Desk.com and get business insights via Desk.com dashboards.

In the second module, Desk.com Toolkit, you perform a deeper dive into Desk.com by configuring a Desk.com Team, users, support groups and setting up multi-channel support, case management, integration with external systems using Desk.com apps; Next Gen console capabilities, navigation and configuration of case management; and further details about the Desk.com reports and dashboards. You can follow along with the Trailhead content in your trial Desk.com.

Additionally, Trailhead adds a new “Efficient Deployments” unit to the existing Application Lifecycle Management and Change Management modules, which discusses the benefits of a reduced deployment, how to use validation and quick deployment to decrease the time to Production deployment, the different levels of and use cases for the test levels and what happens when a Salesforce service update occurs during a production deployment.Don’t worry Trailblazers, this does not impact these two badges if you’ve already completed them.

Application Lifecycle Management module: Efficient Deployments Unit

Change Management module: Efficient Deployments Unit

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Are you a Trailhead junkie like me and many others in the community? Is your name on the Unofficial Trailhead Leaderboard, managed by Adam Olshansky? If not, you need to get added and track your progress against your fellow community members.