Create a Trailhead Playground and Update Chatter

Learning Objectives

In this project, you’ll:

• Create a Chatter profile for the Mars rover.
• Create a Chatter group for communications.
• Create a custom object, custom tab, and a set of custom fields to enable communication.
• Create a flow to automate Chatter posts from the Mars rover.
• Test your automation.

Introduction

“I need more hours in my day!”

More time. It’s one thing everyone wants, but it's the one thing we can’t have. Or can we?

Here at Trailhead we’ve heard your cries for more time to build skills. Good news! We’ve figured out how to give you approximately 40 extra minutes every day. Introducing: Trailhead on Mars.

It turns out that a day on Mars is roughly 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth. You can use those extra minutes to earn valuable badges, so we’ve decided to spearhead human settlement on Mars. Each Trailblazer who participates gets an extra 40 minutes, each and every day. Science!

Now, before you say goodbye to friends, family, and all your earthly possessions, you need to figure out where to settle. After all, there are acres and acres of nearly identical desolate valleys to choose from.

That’s where the rover comes in! There are two active rovers on Mars right now that we can connect with, using the power of Salesforce. Time to put those rovers to work as our real estate agents. In no time, they’ll find us the best patch of rusty Mars dirt to use as our Trailhead basecamp.

In order to prepare the settlement for human habitation by our goal date of 2040, we have to get started right away and we need all hands on deck. Will you join us?

In this hands-on project, you use Chatter and Flow Builder to communicate with the rover, all in Lightning of course! 

Let’s get started!

Launch Your Trailhead Playground

You'll be completing this hands-on project in your own personal Salesforce environment, called a Trailhead Playground. Get your Trailhead Playground now by first logging in to Trailhead, and then clicking Launch at the bottom of this page. Your playground opens in a new browser tab or window. Keep the playground window open while you do this project. After you complete the project steps in your playground, come back to this window and click Verify step at the bottom of this page.

Update the Rover Chatter Profile

The rover sends you dispatches from Mars using the power of Chatter, so we need to set up the rover’s profile before we hand it off.

1. In your new Trailhead Playground, click your profile picture and select your name.
   
2. Click Edit.
3. Enter the following details.
   • First Name: Mars
   • Last Name: Rover
   • Country: Mars
     
4. Click Save.
5. We won’t test for this, but it’s a good idea to update the profile photo, too. Click the user profile link. Click the profile image and select Update Photo to upload an image. Choose any image you like, as long as it’s a JPG, GIF, or PNG file and smaller than 16 MB. We suggest the below image of a rover.
   

Create a Chatter Group for Updates

Now let’s create a centralized location for the rover to give us updates.

1. Click the App Launcher  .
2. Enter Groups in the Search apps and items... box and select Groups.
3. Click New. Note: Getting an error when trying to create a new group? Try updating your org language to English (Setup > Company Information > Edit > Default Language = English).
4. For Name, enter Life on Mars.
5. For Access Type, select Public.
6. Click Save & Next, then click Next.
7. We won’t test for this, but on the next two steps you can add a photo and members to the group.
8. Click Done.

Great work! You’ve laid the foundation to establish communications with Mars. In the next step, we create a simple data model that lets us communicate with the rover and find our new home on the red planet.