In line with our establishment of a golden record, or single source of truth, it is important that an MDM strategy plays nicely with existing business rules, and changes to data are preserved throughout the organization. For example, the process of creating a bank account in a connected system from a Salesforce Financial Services Cloud instance would be done as a user acting on behalf of Salesforce – this provides some traceability as to what instigated that action. The rules in which records are created or updated in connected systems should still largely hold true (albeit some may need adjusting for the processes introduced by the MDM strategy).
The updating of an address for a customer in a bank may have previously been subject to an approval process in the source system. Moving up this approval process to the system of record (such as Salesforce Financial Services Cloud in our banking example) preserves the context of the business rule, so the approval still takes place. Moving business rules to the appropriate system still preserves their context, facilitating the who did what when nature of data management.
There are several facilities offered by Salesforce for preserving traceability and capturing metadata.
User events can be captured in Salesforce Event Monitoring, such as login/logout events, web clicks, API calls, Apex executions, and report exports. More information on Salesforce Event Monitoring can be found here: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/ event_monitoring.
Setup Audit Trail is the log that Salesforce keeps of actions performed in the Setup area of Salesforce, useful in determining what actions have been taken by system administrators and those with certain setup privileges.
Field History Tracking allows for the recording and preservation of changes to specific fields on Salesforce objects (configured in Salesforce Setup). This includes the user that made the change, the date/time of the change, the old value, and the new value. By default, you can track the field history for up to 20 fields per object.
Field Audit Trail is a Salesforce feature for defining a policy for the retention of archived field history data. This can be for 10 years from when the data was archived (as opposed to the 18 months Salesforce allows without Field Audit Trail enabled). Field History Tracking is a pre-requisite for Field Audit Trail (as the old and new values are required, for example). When Field Audit Trail is enabled, the limit of the number of fields to be tracked per Salesforce object is increased from 20 to 60. The retention policy is defined using the Salesforce Metadata API. More information can be found here: https:// help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.field_audit_trail.htm&type=5.
Custom metadata and custom settings facilitate the creation and storage of metadata specific to an organization’s Salesforce implementation. This may include bespoke configuration information, and the storage of values for business logic, for example.
Let’s now summarize what we’ve covered in this chapter.
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