One minor alert re: Lab 2a

Salesforce's recent Winter 21 Release appears to have impacted the display format of Text Area fields in some contexts where text entries that are longer than their horizontal display space are no longer truncated but instead break onto multiple lines. Salesforce has listed this as a bug, pending fix, in the Kanban-style List View context which doesn't affect the labs. But we find this same issue showing up in the Related List view at the end of Lab 2a such that students' screencaps will show the entire contents of the Comments field for each entry, rather than a truncated version.

This should not cause much confusion and we expect it to be corrected by Salesforce soon so we are not updating the embedded screencap at this time. We are simply making instructors aware and noting it in the Help FAQ at MaxzPlace in case students search it there.

One minor clarification update for Lab 2a

Lab 2a is now updated to include an annotation in the margin at the 1st deliverable point (p 4) to clarify to students that, while displaying the verification message being depicted, they can not use the character icon to pull down their name panel as they normally do, but that's ok – they can simply screencap just the Pitch record panel itself because their name appears there as Owner.

In Salesforce, the character icon name panel can't be opened while the record is in edit mode, as it is for that particular case, to show the data verification rule in action. But in this instance, the name panel isn't needed anyway because the student's name appears as part of the record being displayed. The new annotation prevents students from struggling to try to make the name panel appear.

Browser Security Settings Advisory

This Fall semester we're seeing some students having new browser issues. Specifically, Apple tightened their security profile late last Spring by turning on Prevent cross-site tracking by default in Safari 13.1 and later. This setting can cause certain Salesforce pages to fail, specifically for Step 2 in Lab 1a. When working on the labs, students need to turn this off (along with popup blockers and blocking all cookies, as usual).

Other browsers can cause the same problem(s) if students have tightened security settings themselves. Specifically in Chrome, Block third-party cookies should be disabled to ensure Salesforce compatibility. And in Firefox, the security configuration should be set back to Standard if it has been tightened to a higher level.

For students reluctant to relax their general browsing settings, we suggest creating specific profiles with relaxed settings just for working on the labs. Then they can switch back to their stricter profiles for general browsing.

Note that the Help FAQ at MaxzPlace has been updated accordingly.