Allow Access to Information Offline
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the benefits of Offline Briefcase.
- Describe how Offline Briefcase works.
Workers Aren’t Always Online
Ursa Major Solar is an innovative solar energy company headquartered in the southwest of the United States. It sells individual solar products and complete solar power systems to help its customers harness sunshine.
Ursa Major uses Salesforce Field Service to connect its workforce, products, and customers on one platform. Its field service team also uses Salesforce Field Service Mobile to coordinate with customers and the office while they’re out installing and repairing solar power systems. Their mobile devices tell them when an appointment has been dispatched, where to go, what tools and equipment they need, and much more.
Their devices give them so much information that it’s hard to work without them. But sometimes workers lose their signal when they’re in a remote area installing a solar panel or in a basement repairing a solar hot water heater. Wherever they are, if their connectivity goes, they only have access to a few offline resources. Something like an internet service outage can ruin their whole day.
Store Records in an Offline Briefcase
Ursa Major’s workers ask their Salesforce admin, Maria Jimenez, if Salesforce can help them access the information they need when they’re offline. The team already uses the basic offline priming provided out of the box in their field service app. But they want to view more records and declaratively pick the objects and records they’ll see when offline. Maria quickly discovers the Offline Briefcase feature in Salesforce Field Service. It looks like just what her team needs.
Offline Briefcase lets Maria’s workers see more when they go offline—up to 2,000 records per object. Maria can add up to five objects to a briefcase. She can even add custom objects from outside the Salesforce Field Service data model hierarchy. For example, Ursa Major has custom Solar Panels objects that aren’t part of the Salesforce Field Service data model and so aren’t available via basic offline priming. With Offline Briefcase, Maria can pop these objects into a briefcase and her workers can access the data offline. Maria likes being able to pick and choose so she knows exactly what gets primed.
Customized briefcases make sure that the information is relevant to each team. For example, she can create a briefcase for a specific mobile worker or a group, like a group called California Water Heater Installers. That briefcase includes only the models in use in California and filters out models that are only installed in Arizona. That way the California team sees only relevant models.
The objects in an Offline Briefcase can be used for more than just viewing. Because they’re available all the time, Maria can use them in flows and mobile toolkit extensions. She already uses flows in Salesforce Mobile and she immediately starts thinking about new possibilities.
And nothing is permanent. If she creates a briefcase and discovers that her team requires different information, she can edit it later. She can add new objects or delete unneeded ones at any time. That way, her briefcases change to match her team’s needs.
How do briefcases look to her team? First, their phones automatically sync up their briefcases while they’re still online. Then they have access to those records if they ever lose connectivity. Any changes they make while they’re offline get synced up again when they’re back online.
Maria watches a video to see Offline Briefcase Builder in action.
Now that Maria knows the benefits of Offline Briefcase, she’s sure that it’s just what her team needs. She’s ready to get it set up and working on their mobile devices.
