OMG I HATE TASKS! See Action Views, Tasks and Report Alerts for a way to remove Tasks from your org. Do NOT ever create automated Tasks, they are the devilevil!
A few years ago when Chatter first came out I thought ooh wow, we will be able to replace Tasks, Activities, and Notes & Attachments related lists and clean up the page layouts. NOT SO FAST JODIE, a wise veteran said. So, I thought I would revisit this. NOPE. The Feed, as Chatter is now known, is NOT a panacea replacement for these superfluous related lists. So Disappointing.
I want all these GONE! and replaced with the feed.
Well, you could delete them. But who knows a manager in an organisation that feels that they have an extra level of control because they can run a report on Calls Logged for all their staff? (hint, they don't). I bet you can name at least a dozen.
Feed Only
Advantages
- Everything created in one place
- Feed Layouts are great (except for a few annoying things like the tab order and not being available on all objects).
- You can view the latest posts on the view by clicking the Feed button - this shows the last 30 days of feed
- You can get a daily digest of all posts on records you care about (by following the record).
- You can have conversations and keep everything in the one place - on the record.
Things to Note
- Files added to the feed are added to the Files related list and the Notes and Attachments related list.
- Links and Posts only show in the feed
- New Notes are added to the Feed, just like files, but only show in the Notes related list.
- So therefore you need the Notes and the Files related lists added to the record really.
- Old Notes do not get posted to the feed at all - a very good reason to turn on New Notes.
- Attachments added from the Old related list do not get added to the Feed at all - a good reason to turn on New Notes and remove the Notes and Attachments related list completely.
- You can't (yet) mention a record in the feed. That would be cool.
Disadvantages
- OMG have you ever tried to run a report on the Feed?
- First you have to create a custom report type - and that is annoying.
- The body is shown as HTML only
- Auto Generated Posts don't appear in the report
- Activity Posts (eg a Log a Call Quick Action where you post it to the feed does NOT show up in the report).
- Really quite useless.
- So you end up with having to do multiple reports
- One for Activities
- One for the Feed
- And ignore auto generated posts.
- This is not feasible.
- You can't create an email from the Feed, except in Case Feeds
- OMG how good would it bee if Emails worked like they do in Case Feeds, and you could use Quick Text everywhere!?!
- You STILL can't create custom feed filters unless (I think) you are using Service Cloud from Summer '16 - I need to check this.
- You can't see open tasks or upcoming activites in the feed becasue you can't filter on them.
- You can't even search on the word Event to filter events!
Questions
- What happens to attachments on emails sent to Salesforce?
More ranting to come.