Salesforce

Following is an intro to Salesforce acronyms that you will encounter when discussing Salesforce CRM. Acronym Meaning Definition AKA Also Known As Due to name changes Salesforce has made to some products and also the slang/pet names the Salesforce community adorn certain functionality, these three letters have crept into our vocabulary. BA Business Analyst Business Analysts are the people in your organization who are asking ‘why’ (why a process happens the way it does) to understand what the business needs from its technology. As an organization grows, it typically demands larger and more complex software solutions. That’s where BAs come in. BSS Business Support System “Solutions which streamline operations, reduce costs, and help businesses create more innovative products by centralizing customer data and automating processes.” (source) CTA Certified Technical Architect Nope, not “call to action” as you may have guessed! CTAs are the ‘elite’ among Salesforce professionals. CTAs have proven they have the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to design and build high-performance technical solutions on the Salesforce platform. The grueling exam is the highest certification and ultimate test; even though it’s been around since 2012, only a few hundred professionals have earned their CTA creds. DF Dreamforce Dreamforce is Salesforce’s flagship conference – but a conference like no other! Tickets to this annual event are highly sought-after because of the learning and networking opportunities available to the 170,000+ attendees (not to mention the legendary parties, too!) FKA Formerly Known As Due to the name changes Salesforce has made to some products, these three letters have started to creep into our vocabulary to avoid confusion, bringing the person we’re speaking to along with us. EE Enterprise Edition You will commonly hear these Salesforce editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Enterprise Edition (EE) is where most organizations opt to start from, where you gain access to the features that most organizations need. GA General Availability The release status where a feature has been formally released. This happens by its inclusion in a Salesforce release cycle (Spring, Summer, Winter). Support will be available as technical support teams have been briefed on the functionality. (It comes after the Pilot and Beta phases). IaaS Infrastructure as a Service “Self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote datacenter infrastructures, such as compute (virtualized or bare metal), storage, networking, and networking services (e.g. firewalls). Salesforce does not offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services. It is a customer of them, primarily Amazon Web Services.” (source) KPI Key Performance Indicator “A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.” (source)Admins play a key role in KPI tracking, tasked to build Salesforce dashboards that demonstrate business trends. LEX Lightning Experience Salesforce revamped the product interface around 2015 after having a relatively consistent look and feel for its 16 years in operation. Salesforce Lightning was designed to be a big improvement in user experience – to boost user productivity and make CRM a pleasure to use. Most organizations have now transitioned to Salesforce Lightning from Classic. LOB Line of Business Line of Business could often come up when planning Salesforce projects. For example, Sales, Marketing, etc. When it comes to packaging, you can either split by project (let’s say Quote to Cash broadly) or by LOB. PaaS Platform as a Service “A set of cloud-based services that enable business users and developers to build applications at speed…As it’s a cloud-based service there’s no need to worry about the set-up and maintenance of servers, patching, upgrades, authentication.” (source)Salesforce characteristics that make it PaaS include a Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK), managed cloud database, and point-and-click app building. PE Professional Edition You will commonly hear these Salesforce editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. QA Quality Assurance QA is a stage of testing/test automation, which is essential to manage risk and deliver quality Salesforce releases on time. The quality of any Salesforce customizations is your responsibility – not Salesforce’s! QA teams will stress-test the system’s functionality and report any bugs that need to be resolved. ROI Return on Investment As the name suggests, this is the return (the revenue) that an organization has gained as a direct result of an investment (budget spent). This is heard in the Salesforce ecosystem in multiple contexts – it could be an investment into a new Salesforce product, enhancement project, or AppExchange app. It could be RevOps teams performing ROI reporting across their marketing and sales data. SaaS Software as a Service Salesforce set out to be SaaS through and through! A third-party provider, like Salesforce, hosts your CRM and related applications for your users to access over the internet. In the case of Salesforce, licenses to access the service are typically billed annually, with a contractual commitment of one to three years. That’s why SaaS was revolutionary in the beginning, as companies were no longer locked into one system, with the possibility to switch providers without investing in the IT infrastructure themselves! SDLC Software Development Lifecycle “A process that produces software with the highest quality and lowest cost in the shortest time possible.” (source)As Salesforce is a platform that businesses extend according to their evolving needs, you may hear this term! SFDC Salesforce dot com Salesforce pioneered cloud CRM, so it was always referred to as ‘Salesforce dot-com’ in the early days to emphasize its online accessibility and to distinguish itself from premise offerings. The acronym still sticks today, especially among serving community members. SLACK SearchableLog of All Communication and Knowledge This might seem like a strange entry on this list, but Salesforce’s workplace instant messaging/collaboration platform is, in fact, an acronym, standing for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge”. Yes, Slack is a real word you’ll find in the dictionary, often used in slang – to “slack off” or “cut me some slack”. Don’t you think these associations drum up collaborative, highly responsive, productive, happy teams? You’re right – it all sounds dull. SME Subject Matter Expert This is an individual with specialized knowledge in a specific area.