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Preparing for Lightning to Strike
Best Practices in SaaS Management
Salesforce.com is a foundational plat -
form within Okta, supporting the majority
of our sales, marketing and customer
success activities. Our dedicated Salesforce
instance was established shortly
after the founding of the company
in 2009. This instance has evolved
considerably since then. A variety of
fields and objects have been added
to enable new business capabilities.
These enhancements have been
implemented by members of the IT
team with the assistance of many
different contractors and consultants.
Salesforce launched the next
generation of its platform — called
Lightning — in 2015. This version
is superior to the Classic version
currently in use at Okta in terms
of its functionality, usability and speed.
Lightning customers have ex perienced
significant improvements in the productivity
of their customer-facing teams.
They’ve obtained deeper insights into
the behaviors and pref er ences of their
customers as well. We’re planning to
move to Lightning in 2019.
Our existing Salesforce instance has
accumulated significant technical
debt over the past 9 years. We currently
maintain 2500+ custom fields,
83 managed application packages,
90 custom objects and over 40,000
reports. This complexity directly
impacts the usability of the platform.
Account and Contact pages sometimes
take over 30 seconds to load.
Users may have to scroll through
several hundred fields, up to 11 em bedded
frames, and more than 20 related
lists to find what they’re looking for.
Project Medusa is an internal initiative,
launched in 2018, to clean up our existing
Salesforce instance in preparation
for the transition to Lightning. Our
specific goals are to reduce custom
fields by 20%, managed packages
by 15%, custom objects by 30% and
reports by 50%. We plan to reduce
page load times to 10 seconds or less,
reduce the number of fields employed
in commonly used page layouts to
100 or less, and reduce the number
of related lists to 10 or less per page.
In addition to the cleanup efforts being
conducted as part of Project Medusa,
we’re establishing new standards
and governance practices to limit the
growth of technical debt in the future.
These steps include:
Mapping and documenting all API
connections
Multiple applications and websites
exercise Salesforce APIs to transfer
data into or out of our instance. We
are cataloging all API connections and
documenting the nature of the data
being transferred. We are hoping to
reduce duplicative connections and
eliminate references to APIs that
are not being actively used.
Establishing consistent data
definitions for key business terms
We are documenting the name, data
type, description and host object of
all fields and establishing consistent
naming conventions for interrelated
fields that appear in multiple objects.
Standardizing architectural, coding
and testing practices
Standard construction practices for
custom object development will
enable greater reuse of such objects
in the future and make it easier to
maintain customized enhancements
implemented by temporary contractors
and consultants.
Ensuring that material changes to all
of the above are formally reviewed
and approved
We’ve established an IT Change
Approval Board which meets weekly
to review all material modifications
to our instance.
Finally, we intend to implement new
tools to proactively monitor system
health by continuously measuring
database response times and page
loading times.
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