Happy New Year, everyone. We’ve got a big year coming up here at Conga and I’m excited to kick it off with a very topical edition of Tips & Tricks.
Since the launch of Salesforce1 last November at Dreamforce, it’s become even clearer that the future of the Salesforce platform is mobile. Those of us who remember Salesforce Touch can bask in the relative glory of Salesforce1, but Chatter in particular has received some of the most impressive enhancements. Publisher Actions, for example, provide brand new ways to interact with your data that allow an unprecedented level of customization for the adventurous admin. Which brings us to today’s topic:
Using Chatter Publisher Actions with Conga Workflow
Conga Workflow is a paid add-on to Conga Composer that lets you create and deliver documents in response to a Salesforce workflow rule. Conga Workflow allows virtually any Composer solution to be triggered via Salesforce workflow rule, whether the original solution is designed to create and email a quote or to generate and store an account plan in a Chatter group.
One of the four supported Publisher Actions is the ‘Update Action’. As the name suggests, this action lets you update fields on a record in Salesforce. This is perfect for workflow rules – if a field value can change, you better believe we can initiate Conga Workflow.
Let’s take this custom Chatter Publisher Action for a spin before we deconstruct the process. In the below video, I’ll show you how to use a sample Publisher Action to create and email a quote to a particular contact from an Opportunity:
Steps to Create This Solution:
1) Create your Chatter Publisher Action
As I mentioned before, I chose the ‘Update a Record’ option when selecting my Action Type. You can also upload a custom icon for your action – a nice touch for personalization.
2) Add Fields to the Action Layout
The crucial field in the above screenshot is the 'Email Proposal via Workflow' checkbox located at the bottom of the layout. Saving this record with the 'Email Proposal via Workflow' field checked will activate the Salesforce Workflow rule that we set up to trigger Conga Workflow.
However, I've also included some other custom fields to customize the behavior of my Workflow solution. Salesforce recommends that no more than 8 fields be added to the action layout, so I took it right to that limit. Best practice will be only to expose the fields that you absolutely need to enable your Conga Workflow solution. Let’s take a look at how those other custom fields are interacting with the parameters in my Conga Workflow formula field.
3) Incorporate Action Layout Choices in your Workflow Formula
Conga Workflow is an awesome way to make a Composer solution event-driven. A user doesn’t need to click a custom button, interact with a dialog, or really make any choices in the process of creating and sending a document. The Salesforce workflow rule allows this entire document generation solution to fit nicely into an existing business process.
This is great for predefined solutions where the behavior doesn’t need to change much. However, what if we want to be able to adjust a few solution control options? Without a user interface, we can use custom fields on the action layout to drive different values into parameters in our Conga Workflow formula.
1 – The Contact ID selected via lookup on our action layout will provide a value for the &EmailToID parameter.
2 – If the ‘PDF Output?’ checkbox is true, an IF formula provides a value of 1 to the &DefaultPDF parameter. If not, we provide a value of 0.
3 – If the ‘Attach Output File?’ checkbox is true, corresponding IF formulas provide a value of 2 and 1 to the LG3 and LG4 parameters, respectively. This parameter combination will attach the output file to our master record, but also prevent Workflow from creating a completed activity. Salesforce will already create an email-related activity when the email is sent via Workflow, so there’s no need to create another one.
This concept was covered in a previous post where we described how to use a DS7 dashboard. It’s an awesome way to maintain control over some parameter settings while still bypassing a user interface, either with Composer or Workflow.
I hope this gives you some food for thought in terms of how to do more with your Chatter Publisher Actions. If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe so you never miss a post.