Peer Into the Past with the History Component
A Brief History Lesson
Do you wish that you could travel back in time? How often have you clicked a few things in Salesforce, wishing that you could remember which records you visited so that you could go back and take another look?
Let’s put it another way. Let’s say that you’re a support agent on the phone with a customer, and you need to find that one piece of information that might solve the case you’re working on. You know you saw it recently, and you’re busy talking to the customer. You don’t want to put the person on hold while you try to find the record. You don’t want your customer satisfaction score to drop because you made the customer wait and listen to on-hold elevator music. What can you do?
If your admin is awesome (and we’re betting on it because it’s probably you), you’d see that the History component has been added to the footer of your console.
When you click History, you can see the last several records that you visited. You can even click the records to travel right back to them without losing your current spot in a console.
The History component is easy to use, and it can save you and your support team lots of time—fewer searches and less context switching, yay! It also includes bookmarks.
Book It with Bookmarks
What are bookmarks? If you’ve ever used bookmarks in a browser to save the location of a website so that you could revisit it, then you’re familiar with bookmarks in a console. The only difference between bookmarks in a browser and bookmarks in a console are that you can bookmark console tabs.
To bookmark console tabs, go to the tab bar and click 
and select 
next to a tab.
To quickly access your favorite or frequently viewed console tabs, you and your support agents can click Bookmarks on the History component.
From the Bookmarks column, you can get links to share bookmarked tabs with your support team, and you can remove old bookmarks that are no longer useful. It’s definitely worthwhile to remove some of those ancient bookmarks—you can only add up to 50.
Add the History Component to a Console
Adding the time-travelling History component to a console is easy. It’ll take you less time to add the component than to replace a burned out light bulb at home, especially if you’ve already added the Sample Console to your Developer Edition org as described in the Service Cloud Basics module, and assigned yourself the Service Cloud user license.
- From Setup, enter Apps in the Quick Find box, then select Apps.
- Click Edit next to Sample Console.
- In Choose Console Components, add History to Selected Items.
If the History component is already added, that means it’s been automatically turned on for your org. The History component is automatically turned on for all orgs created after Summer ‘15.
- In Align Custom Console Components, choose whether the component will appear on the right or left side of the footer.
- Click Save.
That’s it! In only five steps, you’ve added one of the most time-saving tools to your console. To view the History component and to start adding bookmarks, click Back to Sample Console (1) in Setup or choose Sample Console from the App menu (2).
Time travel was never so easy!