Managing Salesforce calendar still remains one of the most hotly requested and discussed items on Salesforce ideas page. Most Salesforce users work away from their desks and on their mobile devices. So having a calendar interface that is easy to use is very important to a lot of organizations. Just read a few suggestions on this ideas page to understand the demand.
We had a very user friendly calendar UI that presents a unified view of Exchange, Personal and Salesforce calendars all combined in one screen. We just improved the functionality of that by including a simple drag and drop mechanism to create new Salesforce events. This blog post walks you through the process. Keep in mind that this is a premium feature of the Pulsar app, so the admin would have to set up the Pulsar Settings to enable these features. You can find the relevant settings at the end of this post.
1. Launch the calendar by clicking on the icon from Pulsar home page.
2. The calendar Day View presents a split screen for you to choose the objects from the right side scrolling list view.
3. You can actually choose to display more than one type of object there. So notice how you can switch between Leads or Accounts in this example. You can have as many objects as you want. It takes a simple setting to set that up.
4. Now choose which particular account you would like to create the Event for and press and hold. You will see that it will prompt you to drag it on to the calendar.
5. As you drag and drop, it would prompt for a record type if the events are set up to have record types. (Note: You could set up a default record type for the user to skip the selection. Also, you could populate default values for the event, so that the event create screen can be presented with a lot of the information already filled in). The user can then click on Save and it gets saved to Pulsar as well as Salesforce (either instantly when it has network connection or later when it syncs to SF).
6. Finally the display. There is a very cool setting you could play with to display Salesforce events in different colors. In this example, the event has 3 types of values for the Status field (Completed, Deferred, Rejected) and the events are displayed in different colors, so the user could quickly understand the status of their events.
See how simple it would be to create events, especially if you have set up all the values upfront?! Your users will be happy to use features like these and get the best out of the platform. In fact, a couple of our customers use this feature regularly. Let us know how we can help you set it up.
Here are the various settings we have used to demonstrate the above use case.
1. Define which objects should show up in the drag and drop area.
PulsarSetting Name: Calendar Drag and Drop Object List
Key: pulsar.calendar.dayView.dragDropObjects
Value:
Account
Lead
2. Define the record type choices to be presented to user. Note, just specify one if you would like for the user to skip this step and select a default record type to make their life easier.
PulsarSetting Name: Calendar Drag and Drop Default Record Type
Key: pulsar.calendar.dayView.dragDropDefaultEventRecordType
Value:
Customer_Visit
General_visit
3. Specify which field should be read for deciding the event color.
PulsarSetting Name: Calendar Event Color Field
Key: pulsar.event.sfcolor.field
Value:
Visit_Status__c
4. Now map the value of the field to the color to be displayed.
PulsarSetting Name: Calendar Event Field Value To Colors (Visit_Status__c)
Key: pulsar.event.sfcolor.valuesToColors
Value:
Completed : 161,212,144
Deferred : 242,240,99
Rejected : 242,99,173
5. Also, a few default values setup in PSL. This process is documented on our Wiki if you need a reference.