Key Product Areas

What are the Key Product Areas?

The Elements platform was built to support Salesforce Org Management in several ways. It has a broad set of capabilities to support Org discovery, Feedback collection, Metadata scoping, Diagram analysis, and a great deal more. In this module you will see and learn about the selection of capabilities, without diving too deeply into them. 

Will I use all of the Product Areas?

You do not have to use all the features and capabilities to get tremendous value out of the platform. The remaining courses in the Elements Academy will cover the specific use-cases for using Elements with a particular feature set. The outline below just gives a headline explanation for key areas of the product.

Hierarchical maps:

You can use Elements to draw Universal Process Notation (UPN) or architecture diagrams. These diagrams can be used to capture and validate user stories and link them to system metadata for documentation.

However, the key aspect of Elements diagrams is that they are hierarchical. You can create multi-level maps of individual diagrams that are all linked to each other either hierarchically or horizontally, allowing you to put them in context of other business or system logic.

You can learn more about drawing and utilising those diagrams in other Academy courses.

Org models:

Any Salesforce Org you connect to Elements Space is synced for its metadata and based on the received information we automatically create the Org Model. Org Models are metadata dictionaries, hierarchical lists of metadata grouped by type (e.g. flows, apex classes, objects, fields etc.).

An Org Model is your ultimate knowledge hub for your Org and its metadata. We can report on how populated fields and objects are across records, visualise dependencies between metadata and also allow you to document, assess and scope your Org’s metadata with Org models.

Reference models:

Reference models have the same architecture as the Org Models, they are hierarchical lists. While Org Models are populated automatically, Reference models can be populated manually by users. They can be used to create manual metadata dictionaries for other systems in your technology stack.

Changes:

“Changes” is the general category for records that represent the planned change in the system or operating model. We distinguish 3 types of change records:

  • Requirements: Business requirements represent ‘what the business wants as an outcome’, they are meant to be used to capture phases of work. A business requirement in Elements can contain multiple user stories.
  • User stories: User story represents the planned change to the systems and ways of working. It should be a tactical, self-contained change. User stories can be created as stand-alone records or be associated with a single business requirement.
  • Feedback: Feedback represents short comments left by users on Maps, Org Models and Reference models. The feedback list can be used to review requests and ideas left by users and decide on how to address them. This feature is most powerful when your company’s Salesforce end users are allowed to leave feedback from the Salesforce UI using our browser extension.

URL Library:

Any URL links that are added to the Org models, Reference models or Diagrams can be stored in the central ‘URL Library’. If a particular URL link (for instance, a link to the strategy document or sales script) is added to many metadata and diagrams, storing it in the URL library allows you to update it once from the central location, as opposed to having to change it separately everywhere it is linked.

Releases:

Releases represent planned deployments of capability and delivery of work. You can associate user stories and business requirements with the release to show when a particular set of changes is going to be released. You can also associate diagrams with releases and version control how they change over time. Finally, Salesforce metadata are automatically displayed in the release based on user stories that touch them that are in the scope of the release.

Reports:

Elements has reporting capability. Across different areas of the product listed above, you can run reports on different attributes and scope of content. This allows you to export data sets from Elements and conduct further analysis using spreadsheets.

Resources:

Resources represent human roles, systems and facilities that are used by the business to operate. Resources are crucial for business process mapping with UPN and are also useful in architecture diagramming.

Data tables:

Data tables are customisable forms that can be attached to diagram activities, requirements, user stories, and nodes within Org model and Reference models to capture additional information.

Browser Extension:

You can install the Elements browser extension in Chrome and Edge browsers (support pages on how to install). Our extension can serve 3 different use-cases:

  • In-app help and feedback: the extension can be used by end users to leave feedback and access in-app help from Salesforce page layouts.
  • Salesforce insights: the extension inserts the right panel for the metadata as seen in the Org Model in Salesforce Setup. This means that any documentation, dependencies, usage and other information for metadata can be accessed natively from Salesforce setup.
  • User story insights: When connected to JIRA (and other management or Devops systems), the documentation and insights for a user story can be accessed natively for connected user stories in those other systems.

What’s next

Next, you will take a short, theory and practical quiz. Select it from the menu below.

This quiz will help you to recognise the skills and knowledge you have gained, and identify any areas you still need to explore and learn.

Remember, you can revisit these pages, or ask us for help if you get stuck. Once you pass the quiz, click “Next Module” to move on to Module 3.

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