Share, Schedule, and Subscribe to Reports and Dashboards

• Set up sharing settings for report and dashboard folders.
• Subscribe for report notifications.
• Post a dashboard snapshot to Chatter.
• Follow a report or dashboard.
• Set up a scheduled report.

Folder Sharing

Folder Sharing in Salesforce allows you to restrict access to reports and dashboards by users, roles, roles and their subordinates, territories, territories and their subordinates, and public and private groups.

With enhanced folder sharing, you can control who sees what. Each user, group, territory, or role can have its own level of access to a single report and dashboard folder. Viewers can see the data; Editors can determine what data is shown; and Managers can control access.

• [1] With Viewer access you can see the data in a report or dashboard, but you can’t make any changes, except by cloning it into a new report or dashboard. All users have at least Viewer access to report and dashboard folders that have been shared with them. (Some users may have administrative user permissions that give them greater access.)
• [2] When you are an Editor on a folder, you can view and modify the reports and dashboards it contains, and move them to and from any other folders you have Editor or Manager access to.
• [3] With Manager access, you have the keys to the kingdom. You can do everything Viewers and Editors can do, plus control other users’ access to the folder, change the folder's properties, or delete the folder.

Folder sharing is enabled by default in new Developer Edition (DE) orgs, including any Trailhead Playground DE orgs you create here in Trailhead. If your DE organization was created before Summer ‘13, you’ll need to enable this feature, following the instructions here.

If you go back to the old folder sharing model, existing report and dashboard folders go back to the state they were in before.

• If a folder existed before analytics folder sharing was enabled, its properties and sharing settings are rolled back to their previous state.
• If a folder was created while enhanced analytics folder sharing was in effect, it is hidden from the folder list and all its sharing settings are removed. Administrative user permissions are still in effect.

Subscribe to Get Report Notifications

A watched pot never boils, and an excessively refreshed report never seems to yield new data. Why click the Run Report button over and over again when you can subscribe to receive a personal notification? Choose a time to run the report to check against conditions you specify. If those conditions are met at runtime, you’ll get an alert via the method of your choice. It’s like having a personal reporting assistant on demand.

Let’s practice setting up a notification.

1. Go to the Reports tab and open one of the reports you’ve created earlier in this module. If you haven’t created a report yet, do so now by following the instructions in Using the Report Builder.
2. From the Report Run page, click Subscribe.
3. On the Report Subscription page, choose whether to be notified every time conditions are met or only the first time.
4. Specify each condition in three parts: aggregate, operator, value. For example, trigger notifications whenever the sum of amount is less than $1 million.
   • Aggregate is the metric that’s the basis of your condition. It can be Record Count, Average Amount, Smallest Amount, Largest Amount, or Sum of Amount.
   • Operator is the basis of comparison, such as Equal, Not Equal, Greater Than, and so on.
   • Value is the number that you want the aggregate compared to.
5. Your conditions are evaluated when the report is run, and notifications are sent if all conditions are met (up to five conditions per report).
6. Schedule how often (every weekday, daily, or weekly) and when to evaluate for your conditions.
7. For example, run the report every weekday at 7 a.m.
8. Select one or more notification types.
   • Send an in-app notification in the Salesforce app
   • Post to Chatter
   • Send an email notification
   • Execute a custom Apex action, such as creating tasks or escalating cases
9. Make sure the subscription is active if you’re ready to start receiving notifications.
10. Click Save to schedule the notifications.