Help

Owned by Jodie Miners
Last updated: Oct 20, 2021
4 min read

Help documentation for your Salesforce implementation is very important. How you will do it depends on your time, your skills and your budget. 

Revisiting this for Lightning and expanding it to on page and full help text. 

Video

00:00 - Introduction

00:30 - Indicators

01:45 - Page Structure

02:27 - Help Text

02:51 - Validation Rules

04:58 - Related Record Component

06:07 - Rich Text Error

06:59 - Alerts

14:23 - Snippets

16:10 - Simple Help Docs

17:32 - Box Files

19:53 - Specific Components

22:35 - Home Page

25:53 - In-App Guidance

27:34 - Winter 21

28:18 - Web Tab

29:28 - Spekit

30:46 - Summary

Validation Options

  • Before Save Flows

    • See this post and note the “considerations”.

      • I think it’s far too limiting as there needs to be a separate field for each error message needed.

    • this post is a little more involved and deals with picklist values

Alert Options

Help Snippets Options

Link to documents eg in Google Docs, SharePoint, Teams, Quip

  • In-App Guidance - only for short term notifications.

    • You can’t make in-app guidance display because of field values.

    • You can’t create in-app guidance for a specific record type or globally.

    • You can’t add Lightning Components to in-app guidance.

    • A user can’t reopen a prompt on demand. Instead, the prompt can appear more than once to ensure that the user acknowledges the content. This is the biggest limitation that makes it not suitable for a help system.

    • You can’t add in-app guidance to windows (such as Add Record), related lists, the Setup app, or Communities.

    • In-app guidance doesn't appear in the Salesforce mobile app.

    • From this knowledge base article

  • Flow - can be a little slow, can bog down the page a bit.

  • Helpful Links Component

  • Winter '21 Launchpad Component

  • Utility Bar Rich Text Component

  • Pop Ups

  • Guide Me (not particularly useful).

  • Tips (good enough for Free, but there is some paid options also - eg Videos is a paid option. US$1000 per year so pretty pricey).

Help Documents Options

  • Basic Salesforce Help documents.

    • Link to custom help documents in the top right hand corner

    • You could link to the Tip Sheets.

    • Or of course there is Trailhead. But sometimes Trailhead is not good for general users, it is better for people learning how to administer Salesforce. 

  • Create your own Visualforce pages for Object Level Help. (Classic Only)

  • Create your own HTML pages

    • And save them as a Static Resource, and create a custom tab to access it. 

      • Works really well, but the HTML files have to be very small. 

      • I use Screen Steps to create the HTML files. 

    • This works in Lightning too! I still like this option. 

    • Or just create a Web Tab with a link to a Google Doc or SharePoint for a quick and easy option.

  • Box Lightning Component - a really nice lightweight option.

  • Spekit is now free for 10 users. But if you go over 10 users you have to pay for the first 10 first. It is difficult to get set up and even after setting it up I can’t get it to work well. Their demo video is impressive. If you have a resource who’s job it is to do help documentation then this might be useful.

  • Salesforce Knowledge - Hard work. Knowledge creators need to have a Knowledge licence which is paid. But you could then use this component to embed knowledge articles in pages.

  • Quip - yeah, Quip is lovely but you need the full version that integrates with Salesforce and that is just exy.

Not Free

  • Set up your own Confluence instance. US$10 per month for 10 users.

  • In-App Guidance Walkthroughs - requires a myTrailhead licence for each user US$25/u/m - not worth it.

Other

Other Apps not recommended

Also see

Examples of good help docs