Architecting technology with Salesforce — protected by Own
Dobias’s professional background is in software development and platform architecture. Currently, Dobias architects and builds solutions on Salesforce as part of a team of six, responsible for programming, designing, thinking, and troubleshooting.
“I started worrying about not having a backup and recovery strategy to protect my critical data,” Dobias explains. “We were already gathering lots of data in our Salesforce Org.” Of course, they’d need somewhere to store all that data.
The business began buying additional storage based on its needs: Because the company generates many documents and sends a hefty volume of emails, increasingly full storage meant they needed a solution to manage the lifecycle of their data my archiving
With pressure mounting, Oranje Furniture Care quickly needed to find a solution. “Own is the de facto standard for protecting SaaS data — especially for a company like ours,” Dobias highlights.
The fact that Dobias could protect his critical data and manage its lifecycle with Own, was really the winning combination.
Based on the number of cases and amount of captured data that Oranje Furniture Care handles, the company needed a proper archiving policy.
“All together, with Own’s Recover and Archive products, we have an insurance policy, just in case we mess up the data,” Dobias says.
The data Oranje Furniture Care stores in Salesforce and how they use it
According to Dobias, Oranje Furniture Care mainly stores artifacts related to case management. The company is heavy on field service, so this includes service appointments, work orders, and related objects, as well as personal and business accounts.
On top of this, they also store configuration data tables, which Dobias finds flexible. “That’s why I love being able to seed sandboxes using Accelerate: spinning up a new dev sandbox without configuration data is useless,” he notes. “The sandbox seeding template creates a full working dev sandbox in 10 minutes.”
Oranje Furniture Care uses Service Cloud for case management, Field Service for dispatching Service Appointments and Experience Cloud for customer and partner communities and is currently implementing Sales Cloud to enable the sales team to leverage the benefits of Salesforce too.
The company also stores and keeps track of numerous content documents, including images of problems, furniture service programs, and proof of service certificates in PDF format. Oranje Furniture Care generates documents, emails them to customers, and keeps records of these documents — so it’s easy to see how storage problems arise.
“It’s the most troublesome file storage,” Dobias explains. “We try to keep the PDF documents as small as possible by highly optimizing them — with the graphics and images that accompany cases as compressed as possible.”
This was a problem in the past. Technicians using iPads that had no support for native image compression often sent the company photos as large as 3MB each. “That was eating up file storage pretty quickly,” Dobias says. “Own’s Archive [tool] really helps there.”
How Oranje Furniture Care decided what to archive and when
Not every organization needs immediate access to every single document it’s ever generated or received. But most companies will want or need some form of digital paper trail to which they can refer back in the event of a problem. As such, how does Oranje decide how to manage the lifecycle of its data – what to pull out of the system and archive?
“It was a business decision: What records does the business need and for how long does it need immediate access to them?” Dobias explains. Here’s how they answered that question:
- 10 years: Some service program cases — such as free furniture repair services — run registration for up to a decade and would need to remain unarchived for that length of time.
- 18 months: Other cases don’t have such lengthy warranty periods and can therefore be archived within 18 months. The company rarely needs to search for and open archived cases, but it’s nice to have that option if ever required.
- 60 days: Oranje Furniture Care’s automatic translation framework creates records in multiple languages — Dutch, French, German, and English — regardless of the language case workers save the cases in. “Keeping these records for long periods of time makes no sense at all,” Dobias says. He created a policy to archive them within 2 months.
- Immediately: More technical records — like integration and logging records used mainly by IT administrators to track errors and system health — can quickly mount in size. But Dobias points out that his team is confident enough to archive these cases off the bat — especially when everything is above board.
“Without such a solution [using Own’s archiving capabilities], you have to write jobs yourself in batches, then delete them,” Dobias highlights. “Now we can set rules to archive them. It’s easy.”
In deciding whether to delete or archive, Dobias errs on the side of caution, especially at first. He wants to make sure everything’s working as expected and confirm that there are no problems. Even if he’ll never look up old integration login or translation job data, there’s no downside — from a Salesforce standpoint — in opting to archive rather than delete.
The drive to choose Own
Oranje Furniture Care’s quest to avoid exceeding its storage limits was the catalyst for an archiving tool.
“We knew we had to do something to manage our data’s lifecycle with archiving right from the start of the Salesforce implementation,” Dobias emphasizes. His team only realized the company didn’t have unlimited data storage after migrating the data to Salesforce.
They had to establish how quickly they were eating up storage and how much they had left. “We saw storage had increased dramatically,” Dobias says. “We moved on to a different Salesforce license with more space to buy us some time.” But that quick fix wasn’t enough.
There was also a business case for backing up company data and being able to restore it if something went wrong. “A backup and recovery strategy is always important,” Dobias highlights. “That was always top of mind.” The tech team pushed this strategy.
The Salesforce implementation hasn’t been completely smooth sailing for Oranje Furniture Care. “It’s been troublesome,” Dobias says. “We were very busy, had a massive backlog based on features, and would’ve done way more. Of course, the same goes for every implementation.”
Two years into the implementation, they decided on Own. “It was all key to balancing business needs,” Dobias says.
Owning the competition
Prior to choosing Own, Dobias and his team looked at two other solutions. Ultimately, word of mouth won the day. “We had lots of reference customers using Own,” Dobias highlights. “They’re all pleased with it.” These referrals bolstered Dobias and his team’s confidence in Own’s solution: “I’m pleased with [Own’s] products.”
Own: The ultimate time- and storage-saver
Dobias finds his team can rely on Own’s tech support (when restoring, for example) in a way that he can’t with Salesforce. When he needs to archive — which is sometimes a challenge — he can easily use the Own archive widget. The solution saves the team time and effort, and is user-friendly, especially for admins who don’t know how to write code.
Dobias also feels that the pressure has eased. “Normally, I’m so busy. Now I spend the extra time doing my own job properly instead of everybody else’s job.” He’s able to focus on deliverables and quality — of the platform and what his team’s building. “Are people making proper designs and following coding, naming, and configuration conventions?”
Own doesn’t just archive, backup, and recover. It frees people up to focus on doing their jobs better.
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