We’ve started hearing a lot about the Salesforce1 product since Dreamforce in 2013. I’ve been analysing Salesforce1 to take advantage of this new technology for our application and thought I would share some of my findings.
There are many new terms introduced with Salesforce1 and they are highlighted during this post. I’m hoping this will enable you to use this post as an introduction and also a quick reference guide.
Salesforce has been able to operate on mobile devices for a while. These have included Chatter Mobile, Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Touch, Salesforce mobile and off course AppExchange variants such as ForcePad.
Salesforce1 is based on the Chatter mobile product, but has been enhanced enormously with lots of new features. As an administrator, you would have seen the placeholders in configuration setup for these features. I’ll go into these components a lot more later on.
I’m excited about Salesforce1 because the new mobile platform enables us to quickly enhance our existing investment in product development and simply mobile enable it. From customer feedback, it is important to move to a mobile platform because our customer and their customers are commonly accessing their business systems on mobile devices.
There are two key items to take into consideration when setting up or using Salesforce1.
- Design for mobiles – The first is to design everything for mobile applications as a prime consideration.
- Micro-moments – be aware that all interactions and events are based around micro-moments. A micro-moment is a single action/event that a user can select to do and generally implemented in Salesforce1 through publisher actions.
Administrators
Enabling your users access to Salesforce1 is simply a case of going to the Mobile Administration > Salesforce1 menu option and enabling. If you wish to allow users to use the native IOS or Android version then you’ll need to enable these downloads through the setup menu > connect aps options.
As mentioned earlier, there are a number of places where administrators can configure Salesforce1. I found it useful to see the mobile screenshot and then to have notes on where you can configure these in Salesforce. The next section details some high level administration options that are available to you.
Main Navigation Menu
1) The main menu options is accessible by users by clicking on icon in the top right corner. The options shown are configurable by administrators. These are maintained under setup > Mobile Administration > Mobile Navigation.
2) Search options is available for users to do a global search
3) When setting up Mobile Navigation, all items shown above “Smart Search Items” will be in fixed position here.
4) At the spot where “Smart Search Items” is shown, the mobile device will show recently search for items.
5) The items specified below the “Smart Search Items” will appear under the Apps Menu. Keep in mind this is not the same as the “Applications” menu that you would see in top right corner of desktop Salesforce. To make an app appear here, you need to have a Visualforce tab marked as mobile ready or use the new flexi pages.
Page Detail View
In-app and push notifications can be enabled under Mobile Administration > Notifications setup menu.
2) Back arrow returns to previous page
3) Record Highlights. To setup the fields that are shown here, navigate to a new setup option under the object maintenance called “Compact Layouts”
4) Smart Action Bar. These are predefined actions that can include items such as send email, Log a call, map etc.
5) Swipe Left and Right enables accessing different pages for the record view. The first page shows the related chatter feeds, the middle pages show the record detail view and the related lists.
6) Standard Salesforce object actions such as edit, delete, Clone etc. If there are too many options to display then a picklist of options will be shown. Custom buttons are not supported in Salesforce1.
7 Detail Pages. When setting up page layouts for objects, keep in mind the number of fields shown and try to keep this to a minimum. Objects could include having a second page layout and assigning that option to users. Visualforce pages marked as mobile ready can be added to record detail pages.
8) Actions – Please see Publisher Actions in the next section.
9) On the last screen in swiping left is the related list screen. Above the related lists is a section that shows enhanced lookups. To assign the lists that will appear here, edit the page layout and drag/drop “enhanced lookups” onto the Mobile Cards area.
The fields that are shown in the “enhanced lookups” are maintained through the objects “Compact Layout” section.
Publisher Actions
Publisher Actions enable the “Micro Moments” events where a user can launch a new screen or action. For those familiar with custom buttons in the desktop Salesforce CRM will need to reconfigure these to use publisher action.
Publisher actions are either object specific, or global. There are some good notes in these in the online help at: http://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=actions_overview.htm&language=en_US or youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oKlWBKRr18
Developers
There is a lot of information out there about Salesforce1 and we suggest starting with the developer documentation: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs
I found the following items quite useful.
1) When logged into the desktop version, if you paste “/one/one.app” after the salesforce.com, you can see the Salesforce1 application running. This is a great way to quickly see and debug any javascript errors.
2) You need to mark the Mobile Checkbox on Visualforce pages for them to be accessible in Salesforce1. An item that is quite disappointing is that you cannot easily upgrade the Visualforce styling and mobile specific features, such as looksups for the mobile device – this requires coding from the ground up.
3) Custom buttons are not accessible, you need to re-architect you pages to be launched from Publisher Actions.
4) Salesforce1 is written on Aura. This is open sourced and is clearly a technology that will be utilised more going forward. You can see details at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYPTlCoKvmo
A great place to see more details on Salesforce1 is: http://www.salesforce.com/salesforce1/
