Posted at 1:03 AM by Rakesh Gupta, on April 18, 2014
Reports and dashboards display how you performed in the past and what’s happening at the moment. They are important to driving success and implementation of any CRM project. The information provided by reports and dashboards is especially important in today’s arena, where it’s critical to be proactive, rather than reactive, in your approach. You want to be able to spot trends and act on them immediately.
Business Use case:- Higher management in Universal Container wants to use “Opportunity trends” report chart on a Visualforce Page.
The solution of above business requirement
After Sprin’14 release, you can use report Report Chart (That is created by using the report builder) in any Visualforce page, with only a single line of code. Report Chart can include dynamic filters, auto-refresh based on an expiration time, and many other options. With this enhancement, all of your most critical Chart and analytics is in the background, wherever you are working. You no longer need workarounds such as iframes or Javascript to create a Visualforce page with dashboard-like functionality. You can just pull the chart into your Visualforce component by its report ID. Follow the below instruction to complete this requirement
Create a Report with Chart. If you don’t to how to do that please go through my article Embedding Charts Anywhere
Copy the report ID, you can get a report’s ID from the report URL in Salesforce, or request it through the API.
Now create a Visualforce page and use Visualforce tag <analytics:reportChart> with attribute reportID
Posted at 10:09 PM by Rakesh Gupta, on April 9, 2014
Salesforce introduces this feature with winter’14 release. A Salesforce console is designed to increase productivity for users in fast- paced environment. The console’s dashboard-like interface improves the Agent Console by eliminating time-consuming clicking and scrolling, hence you can quickly find, update, and create records. Sales console helps “Inside Sale” reps to get all details like Account, Contact, Lead etc on single screen. After winter’14 release Salesforce console is available for use with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer® 10 browser. Few important benefits of Salesforce console are mention below
Eliminate switching between pages, to access data. For example if you want to view Opportunity related to an account you have to navigate to another page.
User can use keyboard shortcut to make some actions.
Quickly add notes or log a call for each record from same screen without leaving the page.
User will see records and their related items as tabs on one screen so that user never loses context or navigate too far from a record.
Manage incoming or outgoing calls using a SoftPhone.
This feature is available in Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance and Developer editions with Service cloud and is available in, Performance and Developer editions with Sales cloud, also available in Enterprise, Unlimited editions with an additional cost.
Note:- Live Agent can’t be enabled in a Salesforce Console for Sales unless Service Cloud is enabled for your organization.
Business Use case :- User doesn’t have time for clicking screen-to-screen to close a deal. The Salesforce Console for Sales gives you easy access to sales intelligence and helps you quickly contact leads, assess companies, and identify key contacts , all in a dashboard-like interface ,which means more access to contextual data with fewer clicks and less scrolling.
Enabling the Salesforce Console for your Organization
First check Salesforce Console for Sales is enabled for your organization, and the corresponding permission set license and user permission is assigned.
Salesforce Console Permission Set license
Below screenshot shows the user permission needed
User Permission Needed
Note:- To have Salesforce Console for Sales in your organization contact Salesforce.com
Create new Permission Sets
As soon as this feature is enabled for your organization, next step is to create a new permission set. To do that follow the below instructions
Click on Name | Setup | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Permission Sets
Click on New button and enter the Name ( Sales Console) select user license type None as shown in below screenshot
New Permission set for Sales Console
Click on Save
Now assign Sales console App permission, as shown in below screenshot
Sales Console permission
Now assign Customize Application system permission, as shown in below screen shot
Customize application permission
Note:- If another license type is selected, you won’t be able to add the Sales Console user permission for this permission set.
Assigning the Sales Console User Permission Set License
As soon as this feature is enabled for your organization next step is to assign Sales console user permission set license to Sales rep. To do this follow the below instructions
Click on Name | Setup | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Users
Click on the name of user whom you want to assign the permission set license,Navigate to Permission Set License Assignments related list and click on Edit Assignments
Permission Set License Assignments – Step 1
Select the Sales Console User permission set license, and click Save as shown in below screen shot
Permission Set License Assignments – Step 2
Assign Permission sets to User
Now we will assign permission sets that we created to respective Users. To do so follow the below instructions:
Click on Name | Setup | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Users
Click on the name of User whom you want to assign the permission set, Navigate to Permission Set Assignments related list and click on Edit Assignments
Assign Permission set (Sales Console) that you created few steps back, as shown in below screen shot
Assigning Permission Set
Click on Save
Create a Salesforce Console for Sales App
The final step is to create a Salesforce console app for Sales. To do that follow the below instructions
Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Create | App
Click on New, and Select Console, Click on Next
Enter App Label, App Name and Description, Click on Next
On this screen, you can specify Custom logo for app, leave it as it is and click on Next
Select the items to include in the navigation tab. For example, if you want Users to choose Accounts from the navigation tab, move Accounts from Available Items to Selected Items. In our case select Account, Contact, Opportunities as shown in below screen shot and click on Next
Choose Navigation Tab Items
Choose how items display in the console when they’re not selected from a primary tab or sub-tab and click on Next
Optionally, if Service Cloud has been enabled for your organization, you may enable Live Agent and click Next
Assign the Salesforce Console App to user profiles and click on Save.
Now it’s time to test this feature
To test this application select Application (Sales Console) and you will be redirected to a page, which looks like below screenshot
Sales Console Output
Salesforce Console Limitations
A Salesforce console does not support right-to-left languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew.
A Salesforce console does not support Chatter Messenger.
All Salesforce CRM Content items display as primary tabs in a Salesforce console.
Salesforce Knowledge and Live Agent are only available for Salesforce console apps with the Service Cloud.
Salesforce console spring’14 enhancement
1) Multi-Monitor Components: – It allows users pop out portions of the Salesforce console so they can move them to any location on their screens. (Print screen from 125)
2) More Custom Console Components in the Sidebar: – Now user adds and organizes multiple custom console components on each sidebar of a console.
