About Salesforce Indicators

Who created Salesforce Indicators?

Collaborating, creating, and sharing solutions for the purpose of helping others use technology comes as second nature to the Salesforce.org community. What makes Salesforce Indicators particularly special is that it was built by the community, for the community, through The Commons program.

Salesforce MVP (Hall of Fame) Jodie Miners, Director of The Detail Department, an independent Salesforce consultant from Melbourne Australia, had the initial idea based on the needs of her clients and an app in Classic built by two MVPs at the time. During the first covid lockdowns, Jodie decided to learn to code Lightning Web Components and thought this would be an easy project to start with. After much help from many other members of the community an app was published on Github, and installed in production orgs. On github there was a few outstanding issues with a direction to help make the app better. In mid 2022, Tim Schug contacted Jodie via Ohana Slack and said “hey I’ve added the extra features you wanted”. Oh wow, it was a complete rebuild, using Custom Metadata Types, and it was fabulous! The next logical step was to join the Commons program to build upon the community involvement for the app, and get Salesforce Indicators released, and build new features. Learn more about the history and how Salesforce Indicators was created.

What is the Salesforce.org Commons Program?

The Commons creates opportunities and spaces for those in the community that wants to help solve technology challenges within the global Salesforce.org Nonprofit and Education sectors. It’s a community based approach to open source innovation for nonprofits and schools that everyone can participate in and contribute to.

Since 2015, over 2000+ global community members have participated, contributing hundreds of resources and solutions.

Contributors in the program form lasting connections and learn new skills while they volunteer their time collaborating, creating, and sharing solutions for the purpose of helping other Nonprofits and schools see more value in using Salesforce. A variety of solutions like Grassroots Mobile Survey have been launched from the program, for example over 70 informative how-to youtube videos that have received over 275,000 views, reporting and dashboards in the Nonprofit Success Pack, to platform applications like the Outbound Funds Module which is now a vital part of the Salesforce for Nonprofits product offering.

Since Salesforce Indicators is built by the Community, how can I suggest new features?

Salesforce Indicators is an open source solution, built by the community, for the community through The Commons program. They are always looking for new ideas to make the solution as useful for those using it as possible. Share your feedback and ideas in the Trailblazer Community group, managed by the volunteer team.

Salesforce Indicators is an open source solution, built by the community for the community through The Commons program. They’re always welcoming new volunteers to help them manage the solution and the day-to-day tasks on the team, and participate at regular team meetings (virtual), and in their team Slack channel. All Commons teams, including Salesforce Indicators, need a variety of roles and skills to be successful, including developers, documentation writers, marketing and promotion, project management, and much more!

To volunteer, you can reach out to the team at our Trailblazer Community group, participate at an upcoming Community Sprint event and sign up for the Salesforce Indicators team, or contribute as a developer.

Support

Please login to the Trailblazer Community and post your question to the Trailblazer Community group. Community volunteer maintainers of this application and Salesforce.org Commons Program team members actively monitor every post. Existing Issues are tracked in GitHub.

History of the Indicators Component

2015 - Christian Carter wrote an excellent blog post on Frostings and Progress Bars or little graphical elements you can use in simple formulas to enhance the visual information displayed on your Salesforce records.
2016 - Weathervane App is released - built by MVPs at the time, Christian Carter and Beth Breisnes. Jodie got given an unmanaged package version to make it work for Contracts but it was a great app and clients really relied on seeing the colourful icons on their pages. This component is based off the ideas in this excellent app.
2017 - The Winter ‘18 Release allowed us to display formula fields on Related Record Components.
2018 - Jodie did a talk at London’s Calling about using Quick Actions which featured the Indicators created from formula fields. A similar talk was done a few weeks later at World Tour Sydney.
2018 - The Actions! Global and Quick Actions Wiki page to go along with that talk includes many examples on where to get cool images for your formulas, but it’s not so great to be going off platform to just display a few fancy icons.
2020 - Jodie decided to learn to code to build this component herself (whilst in lockdown with not much work to do), so she did the DEX602 Lightning Web Components course (after doing the Aura components in 2018). It is well worth doing this course.
2020 - Hoping that SLDS Icons would be able to be used in Formulas now, and building upon Matt Lacey’s excellent blog posts on using SVGs in formulas, a Wiki page on Image Formulas was created to delve into this. TLDR: sort of possible, but not really.
October 2020 - The original Indicators List component is released.
July 2022 - Tim reaches out to Jodie on Ohana Slack and says “hey, I’ve built the Custom Metadata Types that you want. Wow! Amazing! Fabulous. And Tim built more than that! However, we were left with a dilemma. It’s not Jodie’s component, and it’s not Tim’s component, but we both want it released to the wider community… so maybe, just maybe it could become part of the Open Source Commons. We needed a team though…
August 2022 - Jodie reaches out to Cori from the Open Source Commons to get it into a Sprint. Jodie committed to waking up at 3am to join the sprint in real time, and we discussed following the approach of other OSC apps by adding a Cookbook, and some competitor evaluation.
November 2022 - the CMDT is in the Repo, and Sprint No. 1 with a team of excellent people working on this idea that is built upon the help of so many already.
Mid 2023 - Emma Keeling joins the team to help us get over the line for the release.
October 2023 - Release of the first official version of Salesforce Indicators! Wooohooo!
August 2024 - Release of Salesforce Indicators on the Appexchange!

Future - More features to come! See How to Volunteer.

See the Sprint Pages for the current project team and accomplishments.

Attribution

Icon for the Lightning Bundle and Indicator List Component made by itim2101 from www.flaticon.com