Chapter 3
In This Chapter
Updating your profile
Finding out about My Settings
Changing your personal settings
Working away from work
Adding your contacts to Salesforce
Salesforce was built by salespeople for salespeople. The tool had to be simple to use, relevant to the business of selling, and customizable so that you could use it to do your job more effectively.
The My Profile page captures information that you want your colleagues to see about yourself, to improve collaboration across your company. Think of it as a light directory listing for everyone who works in Salesforce.
From the My Settings page (formerly known as the Personal Setup page), you can personalize details of your application to better suit the way you look at and manage your daily tasks. And if you capitalize on the tools available to you in Salesforce, you can give yourself an edge against the competition and your peers.
In this chapter, we describe how to update your personal information in My Profile, modify your settings by using My Settings, change your display, and access Salesforce anytime, anywhere.
The My Profile page acts like a cross between a corporate intranet page about yourself and a news feed about your collaborations within the company. We talk more later about Chatter, and how the concept of feeds appears in many places in Salesforce. For now, think of feeds as proactive status updates across your company so that people interested in the same things (like an account, contact, or opportunity) can follow each other and stay up to date on the latest news.
To locate and update your My Profile page, follow these steps:
Your profile page appears. In the left column is room for a photo, some contact details, and some statistics based on various interactions on the feed. The feed is the middle column that shows your most recent activities (similar to a feed on a social network). An overview about yourself, and what Chatter groups you belong to, is accessible from the Overview tab to the right of the Feed tab (see Figure 3-1).
The Upload Profile Photo box appears.
A file selection window opens so that you can browse and select your photo from your computer. After you’ve clicked your photo file, click Open.
Voilà! Your photo appears. A smaller version of your photo will now appear to the left of your name within any Chatter feeds so that you can be quickly identified.
Now, to update your contact information so that people know a little more about you, follow these steps:
The Edit Profile page appears. The e-mail associated with your Salesforce account appears, along with other contact information. Complete what you feel is necessary for coworkers who need to reach you.
Update information here to give your coworkers some more background about yourself.
The updates are now reflected on the My Profile page.
This profile page is especially helpful for companies with users who aren’t all in the same location.
My Settings, which you access by clicking your name after you’ve logged in to Salesforce, is the enhanced user interface for what used be called the Personal Setup page. In fact, if you don’t see My Settings after clicking your name, your organization probably signed up for Salesforce prior to this feature’s existence and the administrator hasn’t opted to enable this yet (more on that later). You can still follow along and update your settings, because this is largely a visual update to what was the old Personal Setup page.
My Settings is a set of tools and options that you can use to customize Salesforce according to your individual preferences. You can decide to show only certain tabs, synchronize your Salesforce data with your e-mail program, set how often you want to get Chatter updates, and work with Salesforce while you’re not connected to the Internet.
Salesforce makes it easy for you to better personalize your system by providing all your setup tools in one area.
To locate and navigate your My Settings area, follow these steps:
The My Settings page appears, and you will see a Quick Links and Desktop Add-Ons section (depending on your permissions), as shown in Figure 3-2.
(If you didn’t find a My Settings link below your name, don’t worry. This just means that you’re on the old user interface. You can still follow along by clicking your name, then the Setup option in the drop-down list, and then the Personal Setup link in the left sidebar.)
The My Settings page lists each of its main headings in an expandable sidebar. The Quick Links in the body of the page and the sidebar work hand in hand, but we like to use the sidebar so that we don’t get lost.
Subsections appear. The body of the page doesn’t change if you simply expand the section within the sidebar.
The details for that subsection appear.
You’ve mastered basic navigation on the My Settings menu.
By expanding the Personal heading, you can keep your user record current, set preferences, and customize your display to suit your tastes.
In Salesforce, you have a user record that corresponds to you. You can use that record to keep other users up to date on your contact information.
To modify your user record, follow these steps:
A series of options appear below the heading.
Details of your user record appears in Edit mode. Review the accuracy of your personal information and update it.
Especially if you travel frequently, make sure that you update your time zone both in Salesforce and on your laptop, reflecting your current location. This is particularly important if you’re managing your schedule and synchronizing with offline tools, such as Outlook.
Your user record appears again with the updated information.
If you log in and feel as if you really need only a fraction of the tabs or a select number of related lists, you can customize your display. Your administrator can still override your personal setup, if necessary — for example, after installing an AppExchange application that comes with additional tabs.
Salesforce already provides many standard tabs and groups some of them into apps that you choose from the Force.com app menu. Companies can also create their own tabs. For most users, you just don’t need to see all those tabs at the same time.
To customize your tabs, follow these steps:
The Display & Layout heading expands.
The Customize My Tabs page appears.
The default Selected Tabs list changes when you change the Custom App selection. Salesforce pregroups its tabs into several standard apps for various common business functions. Depending on your business, having these tabs visible may be perfect, or you may want to see more or fewer tabs.
For example, if you’re in marketing and spend most of your time with leads, you might decide to add the Campaigns tab and remove the Customizable Forecasts tab from your Sales custom app.
The only exception is that you can’t move or remove the Home tab.
The My Settings page reappears, and your tabs reflect your changes.
You can also personalize your display by changing the layout on a record page. Doing so enables you to see the most relevant sections first. For example, if you work in a call center, you may want to see cases at the top of your related lists on an account page.
To customize the display of a page, follow these steps:
The Display & Layout section expands on the sidebar.
The Customize My Page page appears for the tab you selected.
For example, if you sell directly to customers, you might want to remove the Partners related list from the Account’s Selected List column.
The Customize My Pages page reappears.
If researching a person’s or company’s background is a large part of your job, Salesforce saves you some mouse clicks by letting you quickly see the social profiles associated with accounts, contacts, leads, and person accounts right from that particular record.
To activate viewing of social accounts and contacts, do the following:
The Display & Layout section expands to show its subsections.
The My Social Accounts and Contacts detail page appears.
A list of social networks appears. If you have a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook account, this will allow you to later sign in to those social networks from within Salesforce, to see profiles for the people and companies that you’re researching. (You don’t generally need a YouTube account.)
Don’t worry, the ability to see an account’s or contact’s social network information is only available to the individual Salesforce user who enables this for himself. Your colleague will need to enable this for herself, and have accounts to those social networks, if she wants to take advantage of this feature.
Also, after Social Accounts and Contacts is enabled, you’ll only be able to see as much as your account on that social network allows you to see, and what the person or company that you’re looking at wants you to see. If you’re in suspense as to how this actually works, Part II delves into this in more detail.
When you need help from your administrator, salesforce.com customer support, or customer support from a third-party AppExchange package that was installed in your organization, you can grant any of these folks temporary login access to your account. By gaining access to your account, the person helping you can provide better assistance from your perspective, because she can view your pages as you.
To grant login access, follow these steps:
The Grant Account Login Access page appears.
Your administrator, salesforce.com support, or the AppExchange vendor’s support contact will be able to log in as you through the expiration date.
The My Settings page appears.
For many companies, Microsoft Outlook is a critical piece of your work day: It’s how you communicate with customers and schedule your meetings. Salesforce lets you synchronize with Outlook so that key conversations or meetings in Outlook can be reflected and saved in Salesforce. And if you’re a road warrior as well, Salesforce provides various ways to log in from your mobile device and close that deal, without having to squint too much looking at that smaller screen.
Salesforce for Outlook is an updated version of what was previously known as Connect for Outlook. The new version (and hence the name evolution) allows you to automatically (or manually — it’s your choice) record Microsoft Outlook e-mails, meetings, and tasks into Salesforce. In the following sections, we show you how to install and configure Salesforce for Outlook for your specific synchronization needs.
In most cases, installing Salesforce for Outlook is a simple process. If you connect to the Internet via a proxy server or if your company has a firewall, you might want to consult with your IT department.
To install Salesforce for Outlook, follow these steps:
The Salesforce for Outlook page appears.
The Salesforce for Outlook configuration that is specific to you appears. It shows predetermined settings and objects that will be synchronized. This lets you know what is and isn’t going to be syncing with Outlook. And depending on your administrator’s configuration, you may be able to modify these settings. In case you disagree with the settings, you get to talk with your administrator first before you actually sync anything.
Salesforce for Outlook is only available for Microsoft Windows operating system users because Outlook is only available on Windows machines.
An executable (.exe
) file downloads. Before continuing to Step 4, make sure that you have closed Microsoft Outlook on your computer by choosing File⇒Exit from the Outlook toolbar.
Select your language, and complete the installation wizard, as shown in Figure 3-6.
The setup wizard appears.
Click the Finish button. In the lower-right corner of your screen, you should see a small gray logo of Salesforce for Outlook. This means that it’s installed and waiting for Microsoft Outlook to be opened.
A Salesforce for Outlook login window appears. Enter your Salesforce username and password in the appropriate boxes. Then advance to the next screen.
If the e-mail already exists within your Salesforce organization, the contact or lead associated with it will appear in the Salesforce side panel in your Outlook window.
The e-mail is now recorded in Salesforce as an activity.
In today’s world of tablets and mobile devices, you can be anywhere and access Salesforce. To best experience Salesforce from your mobile device, find the Salesforce Chatter app in the iTunes store (if you’re an iPhone user) or the Google Play marketplace (if you’re on the Android operating system). They’re free to download and you get instant access to your most-viewed accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, leads, and any other custom tabs specific to your company.
One of the keys to making Salesforce productive for you from Day 1 is to get your contacts into the system. If your contacts exist primarily in Microsoft Outlook, you might be better off synchronizing your data. Otherwise, Salesforce provides easy-to-use wizards that help you import contacts and accounts. See Chapter 5 for the details on importing, and see your administrator if your data goes beyond the limits of the import wizard. (For example, if you have historical activity linked to contacts, you can’t import those records by using standard wizards.)