Big Idea or Enduring Question:
- How can you automatically send password expiration reminders to users?
Objectives:
This blog post will help us to understand the following
- Use Schedule-Triggered Flow to automatically send a reminder email to users
- Use Schedule-Triggered Flow to run a job that executes every morning at 8:00 am
Business Use case
Pamela Kline is working as a System administrator at Universal Containers (UC). She has received a requirement from the management to send out a reminder email(Morning at 08:00 am) to users to change their passwords 7 days before they expire.
Automation Champion Approach (I-do):
Changing Salesforce passwords periodically is crucial, as it prevents hackers from gaining access to your org, even if they have stolen user credentials. Configuring password expiration to a set number of days, say 90, is a common practice among IT admins.
In Salesforce a system administrator can set the password, for example – User passwords expire in days we define(like 30, 60, 90, etc). The main problem with this approach is that the user doesn’t get any reminder email before or after their password expiration date.
When it comes to notifying users that their passwords are going to expire soon, more communication is always better. Users do not enjoy the password change process; keeping them informed as to when their password will expire is a great way to improve their experience.
There are a few possible solutions for the above business scenario. We will use Schedule-Triggered Flow to solve the requirement. Before we unwrap, let us understand what Scheduled-Triggered Flow is. Scheduled Flows are not triggered by an Event on the data; they simply run when a scheduled time arrives. Scheduled Flows run as follows:
- Once (On a particular date and time)
- Daily (On a particular date and time)
- Weekly (On a particular date and time)
Remember, when a Flow starts, a Flow interview runs for each record that matches the filter criteria – no looping is required. The matching record is stored in the $Record global variable, so you can reference the variable, or its fields, throughout your flow.
Before discussing the solution, let me show you a diagram of a Process Flow at a high level. Please spend a few minutes to go through the following Flow diagram and understand it.
Let’s begin building this automation process.
Guided Practice (We-do):
There are 4 steps to solve Pamela’s business requirement using Schedule-Triggered Flow. We must: Read the rest of this entry!