Introducing Custom Columns

In the wake of GDPR regulation, most companies have been scrambling to take inventory of the personal data that they store on their customers in their Salesforce orgs. You know what that means: more spreadsheets. That’s one of the use cases that inspired our latest feature: custom metadata columns.

When would I need to use custom columns?

With custom columns, you can add custom, company-specific information to existing fields, objects or other metadata in your Data Wiki. In other words, it’s a streamlined way to extend the benefits of the Spekit data dictionary to other parts of your business. Here are some use cases to get you started:

• Source: Do you struggle to figure out how a particular field is populated? Create a column to store the original source of that data, ex: Is it from a website sign-up form or is it manually entered data?
• Mappings: Store mappings between Salesforce API names and other internal databases or system API names to make it easier for anyone in your company to work on a report or integration.
• GDPR compliance: Keep track of which fields or objects in your Salesforce org store personal data.
• External Links: Add links to external documentation related to your metadata at the field, picklist or object-level, ex: Training modules in Trailhead, and tickets in JIRA/Confluence or Cases.
• Custom definitions by team: Store relevant info catering to different audiences, ex: a “Retail Sales Definition” column.
• Synonyms: Do you use certain terms interchangeably? Add a column for synonyms so that Spekit can easily pull up matches regardless of what term the user searched.

Add custom columns to your Data Wiki and use the toggle to display them into view:

How do custom columns work?

Custom columns can be added by Spekit Admins to all terms, or to a single term type. For example, you may just want to track that data point for objects and not for fields or picklist values. Add a new custom column from Settings > Custom Columns. Custom columns and their data can be viewed by all users. Once added, the new data point will appear in the expanded when clicking on a term. Text can be added to the custom columns in the same way that the definition or business rule is updated by clicking the edit button. You can also use the column toggle to display new columns in the main Data Wiki. That's all folks. Request a demo of Spekit today and check back soon for new features.