Announcing the Salesforce Handbook

Recently, Jeff Douglas and I saw the potential for a beginner’s book – aimed at business owners, analysts and developers, that comprehensively documents Salesforce and Force.com. There is a tonne of documentation out there and we thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handbook that lightly summarised the most important areas of the platforms as well as offering some best practise advice”. We mulled it over for a time, and today we’d like to announce that we’re currently writing: The Salesforce Handbook A newcomer’s guide to building applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform. Hand-in-hand with the book we’ll be publishing content from the book on a WordPress site. Here you can expect to find excerpts from the book, but also content that supplements the book e.g. areas that’ll serve as best-practice hubs with links to official documentation, blog posts that rock the party, and even superb discussion forum …

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the sharing model cannot be updated through the api

Now I’m sure there’s a reason for this but it makes me sad a bit. Especially when working with a team of developers. Recently I found myself in the following situation,

My team and I had been building a Force.com application and were interested in implementing an UAC model. We had setup the UAC model on one of the Orgs using profiles, roles and sharing rules(we had some issues here too) and then attempted to commit these changes into our SVN repository. Happy that things were going so well, each developer checked out the code and BHAM! we were no longer able to deploy object definitions. [Slow pan to me on my knees screaming to the heavens. A thunderbolt, then a thunderclap overhead]

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