Salesforce Chatter Security and Best Practices

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Chatter has taken a giant step forward in the online chat software market for customer relationship management programs.

Since I covered the basics of Chatter in a previous post, I would like to cover some of the questions asked about Chatter and offer some best practices.

Before we get started remember that a Chatter license is included with your Salesforce license, regardless of the edition of Salesforce that you are using.

People in your company who are not already using Salesforce can now get a  Chatter only license for free.

Salesforce Chatter SecurityFirst, we will start off with some common questions:

Is Chatter like other IM programs where anyone can join or is it only for my company?

Since Chatter is based in Salesforce, it is completely private and secure for your company. Chatter is just for users of your Salesforce to see and collaborate on. (more…)

Salesforce Best Practice of the Week: Create a new record from its related record

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When creating a new contact, for example, go to the account for the contact and use the New Contact button. When creating a new opportunity, go to the contact and use the New Opportunity button. This will fill in the linking information for you and eliminate the possibility of associating to the wrong record.

Want to receive our list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here.

StarrForce is a Salesforce.com registered consulting partner who provides Salesforce support and implementation services to maximize your Salesforce investment.

Suddenly Receiving Salesforce Chatter Digest Daily Updates?

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Salesforce has recently updated to Winter ’11 and one of the defaults is a daily email of your Salesforce Chatter posts and feeds. If you would like to stop receiving this email, or if you would like to receive it weekly instead of daily, please follow the steps below:

Log into Salesforce and select your name up top in the blue header. Select setup and then under Personal setup, select My Chatter Settings and then Chatter Email Settings.

Here you can turn on or off all emails, decide what will trigger an email and set the frequency of your digest emails. The “Help for this Page” link at the top right will have more information on this subject.

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Salesforce Role Hierarchy and Security

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One of the most misunderstood and underused feature of Salesforce is the Role Hierarchy.

Without a well-designed Salesforce role hierarchy, companies are likely to have the following problems:

- Salesforce sales forecasting does not work
- Private sharing model does not meet company needs
- Managers can not easily see what subordinates are working on
- Chatter license holders cannot see or follow the records they care about
- Chatter license holders can see and follow records they should not have access to! (more…)

Best Practice of the Week – Smart Page Layouts Improve User Adoption

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Logical and simple arrangement of the page layout is important for ease of use and increasing user adoption of Salesforce.com. Do not assume that a default page layout is appropriate for your organization. Talk with your Salesforce users and get their feedback on how they think a page should be arranged. As a best practice, fields should be arranged in a logical format with appropriate sections and then standardized across all of your pages and objects. This makes finding and entering data easier and can improve user adoption of Salesforce.com.

Want to receive our list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here.

StarrForce is a Salesforce.com registered consulting partner who provides Salesforce support and implementation services to maximize your Salesforce investment.

Salesforce Email Templates, A Great Time Saver

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Salesforce email templates can be a great time saver if they are created and organized properly. Among the applications they’re useful for are customer support, sales management, and sales automation.

Salesforce email templates

How often do you find yourself copying an old email so that you can send it to someone else? How often do you find yourself composing the same email over and over?

Once you create a few templates, sending an email is just a matter of a few clicks. This can save a lot of time in customer support and sales management roles. And because Salesforce is an online and web based CRM system you can easily share the templates you create with anyone in your company based. (more…)

Best Practice of the Week: Prevent Duplicate Records in Salesforce

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Remove duplicate information prior to importing it into Salesforce. Duplicates are easier to remove from a spreadsheet than they are in Salesforce.

Want to receive our complete list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here.

StarrForce is a Salesforce.com registered consulting partner who provides Salesforce support and implementation services to maximize your Salesforce investment.

Understanding The Console Feature in Salesforce.com

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Salesforce has a powerful tool called the Console. The Console allows you to combine multiple Salesforce pages into one screen so you have access to all of the related information in one place.

For the support person, this means that you can have a list view of your open cases (trouble tickets or work orders) at the top, the main page that you are working on (the actual case and any related lists like tasks or emails) in the middle, and on the right, any related records like account information, service contract information, and previous cases. (more…)

Salesforce Chatter License Pricing for Professional Edition Users

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Here’s the latest on how Chatter licensing works for companies on Salesforce Professional Edition.

If you want to purchase less than 15 Chatter licenses:
- Chatter will only have access to Profiles, People and Content.
- Cost is $180/year per person

If you want read-only access to Accounts & Contacts there is an additional cost of $300/year per person.

If you purchase 15 or more Chatter licenses then read-only access to Accounts & Contacts is included for the cost of $180/user per year.

Chatter does not include access to Leads & Opportunities.

Want to receive our complete list of more than 50 Salesforce best practices? Sign up here.

StarrForce is a Salesforce.com registered consulting partner who provides Salesforce support and implementation services to maximize your Salesforce investment.

Salesforce Chatter

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CRM is now social. With Chatter Salesforce.com is one step closer to its goal of making enterprise software as easy to use as Facebook.

Have you ever been working on a sales or support project and had to track down a co-worker to find out what they have done on it? Maybe you go to call a contact and find out that a co-worker has already spoken with them and the contact is now with a different company? Or say you have a spreadsheet that you want to share but you do not want to email it as it will get lost in the 200 emails your co-workers get each day? (more…)