Big Idea or Enduring Question:
How do you automatically send reminder emails to your users to upload a profile photo on Chatter?
Chatter is a powerful Collaboration tool for your organization, for both internal users and partners. Each user has a visible profile page containing his Chatter wall as well as information about the user, including an Image. The first thing to do in Chatter is uploading a profile picture to help your colleagues put a face to a name. In Salesforce I have never found Out of a box solution to send a reminder email to users to upload Chatter profile photos. In this article, we will develop an app by using Flow.
Objectives:
After reading this blog post, the reader will be able to:
- Use Schedule-Triggered Flow to find a list of users who doesn’t have a picture uploaded on Chatter
- Use Schedule-Triggered Flow to automatically send a reminder email to users
- Use Schedule-Triggered Flow to run a job that executes every Monday morning at 8:00 am.
Business Use case
Pamela Kline is working as a System administrator at Universal Containers (UC). She has received a requirement from the management to send out a reminder email once a week every Monday at 08:00 am to users who don’t have a Chatter profile photo.
Automation Champion Approach (I-do):
There are a few possible solutions for the above business scenario. We will use Schedule-Triggered Flow to solve the requirement. Before we unwrap, let us understand what Schedule-Triggered Flow is. Scheduled Flows are not triggered by an Event on the data; they simply run when a scheduled time arrives. Scheduled Flows run as follows:
- Once (On a particular date and time)
- Daily (On a particular date and time)
- Weekly (On a particular date and time)
Remember, when a Flow starts, a Flow interview runs for each record that matches the filter criteria – no looping is required. The matching record is stored in the $Record global variable, so you can reference the variable, or its fields, throughout your flow.
Before proceeding ahead, you have to understand the User object. It Represents a Chatter user profile.
Field Name | Details |
FullPhotoUrl | It represents the URL for the user’s profile photo. This field is available even if Chatter is disabled. The URL is updated every time a photo is uploaded and reflects the most recent photo. |
Now you might be wondering how you can find the list of users from FullPhotoUrl. To understand it better, let’s take a look at the SOQL query in the following screenshot:
- URL ends with profilephoto/005 – It means a user doesn’t have a profile picture
- URL ends with some record id (profilephoto/729B0000000Q6RV) – It means a user already uploaded the profile picture.
Before discussing the solution, let me show you a diagram of a Process Flow at a high level. Please spend a few minutes to go through the following Flow diagram and understand it. Let’s begin building this automation process.
Guided Practice (We-do):
There are 3 steps to solve Pamela’s business requirement using Flow. We must: Read the rest of this entry!