Salesforce Contact Manager is a feature of the Higher Logic Thrive Community-Salesforce integration with which you can create and update Salesforce Contact records through a form in your Higher Logic Thrive Community (Thrive Community). New and updated records are then written from Thrive Community to Salesforce; the information does not "live" in your Thrive Community site.
In order for this feature to work:
- You must have a fully operational Thrive Community-Salesforce integration.
- Salesforce Contact Manager has to be enabled and configured by Higher Logic staff.
NOTE: If the feature is not enabled, create a case and request that it be enabled and configured.
Salesforce Contact Manager options
You can use Salesforce Contact Manager to create and/or update Salesforce Contact records in your Thrive Community site. These options are mutually exclusive, but both can be enabled. This will have been decided by your Salesforce account administrator and then set up by Higher Logic staff.
- Profile Updates - When existing Salesforce Contacts edit their contact details in your Thrive Community site, the updates automatically get written to Salesforce. The Salesforce account administrator will have designated which fields can be updated and which of them are required.
- Contact Creation - When users create a profile to "apply for membership" in the Thrive Community site, the request is automatically written to Salesforce. A check is made if that email address already exists in Salesforce -- if not, a new contact is created. The Salesforce account administrator will have designated which fields will be included on the new-Contact page and which of them are required.
Fields in the Salesforce Contact Manager
The fields that will be presented to users when they create and update their profiles are configured on the Salesforce Contact Manager configuration page (shown below) by a Higher Logic staff member.
NOTE: The fields that populate this configuration page are taken from the Salesforce Contact Object and reflect each customers' unique Salesforce database.
NOTE: In the above image, the Salutation API has an Edit button. Refer to Edit picklist example, below, for information.
Show & Required examples
The image below shows some of the options you have with the Show and Required settings.
- Email - this field will display when users create and/or update a profile, and they must provide their email address during both actions.
- FirstName and LastName - these fields will display when users create and/or update a profile, but providing either name is optional.
- Salutation and MailingPostalCode - these fields will display only when users update their profile, and providing these values is optional.
Edit picklist example
Any "picklist" type field will present a dropdown list to users. These fields have an Edit button in the list, but the field has to be set to Show for either Creation or Update for the button to be active and editing to take place.
- Click Edit.
- Click the dropdown and select the options that you want to display to users.
- Click OK.
New Contact best practices
Salesforce Contact Manager can write fixed values to specific fields in Salesforce. You can use this behavior to simplify and streamline the Contact-creation and approval processes.
Dedicated AccountId
- Create an Account that is exclusively intended to store Thrive Community-based new-Contact requests.
- Associate that Account (AccountId) to this record-creation process so that all new Contacts get assigned to this Account.
- Create a Workflow in Salesforce so that whenever a Contact gets created under that AccountId, an email message is automatically sent to the new-Contact approvers.
- Upon approving, the approver assigns the Contact to a "proper" Account in Salesforce.
Formula field
- Create a check box-type formula field in your Salesforce Contact object, e.g., IsCommunityEligible.
- Configure your integration to import only those records that have the IsCommunityEligible box checked.
- Define the formula of the IsCommunityEligible check box so that it is queried when the Contact's AccountId is any value other than the fixed AccountId for applications.
Because formula fields automatically update, when an approver sets an Account for a new Contact, the value of the flag will be updated and, within 30 minutes, the record will be imported into your Thrive Community site.
Apex Trigger - Prevent duplicate emails
NOTE: Rather than creating an Apex Trigger, as outlined below, you may be able to use the Salesforce Duplicate Management tool to create a rule to check for duplicates. For more details on this tool and process, contact your Salesforce support team.
This Apex Trigger will:
- prevent duplicate emails (or any other field)
- and allow you to customize the error message.
The creation of this trigger requires an experienced Salesforce developer/AMS manager to:
- Setup workflows
- and perform a mass update for all your current contacts to trigger the workflow.
NOTE: The Apex Trigger is attached at the bottom of this article in a .txt file.
If you are not comfortable configuring this trigger, provide this information to your Salesforce developer/AMS manager.
An example of this Apex Trigger in use in a Thrive Community is shown below.