If you’re a button click admin the one thing you need to capitalize on is creating buttons on objects. Sounds ironic right? But it’s true. For almost every object in my instance I have created custom buttons to ‘do-things’ and ‘make Salesforce.com look smart.’
To be fair it would be easy to publish a book on the number, type, and actions that buttons in salesforce could do. I realize this and really just want to spark some thought and get you on your way to creating buttons for your users. I also don’t want to clutter up this post with a bunch of code. So I have put the codes for the three buttons I will talk about on this handy-dandy downloadable pdf (you will want to download this to follow along). I’ll start off simple and get a little more complex as we go.
Current News
This button- in my opinion- is simple and easy. It’s a detail page button that displays in a new window and pulls in the Account name (or whatever data you want to pull from the record) and inserts it into the URL in a google news search. My users absolutely love this. The code I give you is for a custom object I created for tracking competitors. A word of advice- I use the behavior of “Display in a new window” that way the user doesn’t lose where they are in Salesforce- and potentially not have to log back in.
Pull data from another site
Here is my theory- I can’t track everything. And some websites do a really good job of tracking data that is important to my users. Hmmm. Sounds like a job for a custom button. We have the need to regularly check corrections data for a particular state. I can’t keep up with all of that data so I created a custom button to fetch that data for my users. Like the previous button it pulls existing record data and plugs it into a URL and opens in a new window.
Left voicemail
This button is different from the previous two in that it executes an action and keeps you in salesforce. I can’t take credit for creating this so I have included the youtube video below so you can see it for yourself. This button saves countless clicks. My Inside Sales staff use this button a lot when making calls and thanks to Brandy (@forcedotmom) for helping me to dissect the code.
Sometimes being the best damn button-click admin means creating buttons. They can be another way to keep your users in Salesforce or execute time saving procedures. However, I don’t think we will see Buttons Galore being the next James Bond villan.
Photo credit: Laineys Repertoire’s via Flickr
Have you looked at Know Your Enemy? http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000003HnrCEAS
With your recent Chatter deployment and it sounds like you are tracking competitors maybe a good fit?
There’s also an old s-control that embeds Google news in a account layout section. Pretty slick but if you have a lengthy page layout your button approach might be preferred.
Keep the Monday coffee reads coming….!
I have looked at Know your Enemy. Unfortunately I built our competitor object over a year ago and have since really honed it for our organization. I would hate to have to switch to something else now. I wish I had it a year ago, it could have saved me a lot of time.
How’d you like the button we shared last week to send an email from a Contact using a specific template and pre-populating it?
LVM button is great, too, and you can use it for so other Activities such as when you visit a site and see 5 people at once.
Mike, another great post!
Nice stuff. Adding to the Google News button, I enabled Chatter Alerts in a test org, totally cool. It posts Google Alerts to the Chatter feed. Pretty neat.
Later man!
Garry