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In Part 2 of our series, we discussed how we create tasks for ourselves and other team members and where to find those tasks again later. In part 3, we continue the process of organizing and presenting that information in a concise and easy to follow manner.

So, in this lesson, we continue to examine the creation and use of reports to help manage our tasks. If you recall from our earlier discussion, we generally want to know the following things about individual tasks…

1. What is the Task.
2. Who is the Task assigned to.
3. When was it assigned.
4. When is it due (if has a due date).
5. Is it on time, or is it late

More below the fold!

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When we work in Salesforce, we have the advantage of being able to communicate across the enterprise using the activities tools. Now, we have already covered the process of creating activities, but as we can see from our example, we don’t have a lot of visibility.

But you might be saying to yourself right now “But I saw all my tasks and events, thats pretty visible, isn’t it?”.

You would be right about that, it is pretty visible to you, but what about this scenario. Lets say we have used the activity creation tools to create a task for another one of our team members. How do we know its complete? Heck, how do we even remember that we created the task in the first place. Well, this series of articles is going to cover this in some detail. Get your propeller hats out, because we are going to dive in to some advanced tips and tricks below the fold!

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Scott over at Arrowpoint Products and Perspectives on Salesforce.com has relased a new AppExchange application. Looking it over, I would think of it as a bit of a mix between a FAQ and a Wiki. In Scott’s words.

The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise.

This is a problem we would frequently run into, and I have often thought that the Salesforce document solution wasn’t very strong in its basic implimentation. This is something I am going to have to play with. You can read more here and here.

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Great article over on Thoughts on Salesforce.com. This discussion revolves around understanding the structure of that confusing blog of text in the address bar, the Salesforce URL. So why is this important?

Well, when you get into the more advanced tips and tricks (and we will) understanding whats going on with the URL is key. From the URL we learn alot about what kind of data we are looking at in Salesforce. Armed with that information we can do things like pre-canned parameter reporting and other neat tricks. This information helps us solve a major problem, and I think the folks at Thoughts on Salesforce.com say it best.

Of course creating a quick launch button requires understanding Salesforce.com’s URL structure because Salesforce.com in their infinte wisdom has decided that Professional and Team customers are second class and don’t need access to the API because we are just not sophisticated enough to need it. (Sorry there if my sarcasm there is just a bit too obvious.)

Check out the article, its very interesting.

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