Salesforce continues to grow and acquire new technologies and develop new features and while I pride myself on knowing the declarative side of the platform well, what I truly pride myself on is knowing the platform well enough to do the research quickly and efficiently to answer the ultimate question: Can we do this with clicks, and if so what is the best way?
So in the spirit of learning and sharing, here are a couple cool things I learned about recently…
Custom Calendar Views for ANY Object!
That’s right, You can view any object records that contain date or date time fields on a calendar!
In the below example I will show you how to configure a custom calendar to view your campaigns.
1. Click on the app launcher and click Calendar.
2. In the calendar view, in the lower right corner you can see a view of your calendars. By default you’ll be able to see your events. Click on the gear icon and click New Calendar.
3. Select the object you want to display on your calendar.
4. Name your calendar, select the start and end date fields, and the Field you want displayed as the name on your calendar. The Apply a filter drop down will let you select from available list views of the object. Use list views to configure filters.
5. Voila! Your Campaigns will now display as a calendar. If you use date fields as start dates and end dates, records will display along the top. If you use date/time fields, records will display in the time areas of the calendar.
I think this is an awesome feature and quick and easy to set up. The only drawback currently is the inability to share custom calendars with others on your team. However, it should only take a few minutes for users to set up calendars of their own that match.
Email Actions can populate or clear Cc and Bcc addresses using formulas!
When you create a custom record action, you can specify predefined values. This functionality can be used on send email actions to to clear or populate custom Cc and Bcc fields as well as To and from Fields.
1. Start by creating a custom record action to send an email.
2. In the Predefined Field Values section click New.
3. Select the field name and use the formula editor to specify default predefined values.
This functionality is great for if you have a shared team email address that you want Bcc’d on every email sent from those team members.
But what if each team has a different shared team email address that they want Bcc’d on every email sent from those team members?
In this example I used a CASE() function to populate the correct team email based on the team associated to the case record.
Here you can see that when I use the send email action on the case record now, the correct team email address is auto populated as a Bcc.
The great thing about this functionality is the ability to specify these values with formula builder so you can get very advanced with the logic if need be. If you hit limits there you can also use different custom email actions on different page layouts.
There is always more to learn; the best way for Client A might not be the best way for Client B and the way we did it last year might not be the best way to do things this year. If you learned a cool new thing recently, I welcome you to share it in the comments. Never stop learning and growing, and Happy Trailblazing!
