I need some expert advice on how best to implement a system for grouping of contacts. We use the non-profit template of Salesforce (Enterprise editiion) and our needs are a little bit specific.
Our goal is to create very specifc and very rich functionality surrounding grouping of contacts into logical containers that are considered permanent/semi-permanent.
Each user should be able to create his/her own groupings of contacts (picked for a specific purpose) and choose to share/not share those groupings with others. There will be other groupings which are "corporate" and should be visible and usable, but not modifiable, by all.
While there isn't likely to be many contacts per group, there IS likely to be many groups and I need for some way to make the access and management of these groups to be workable.
We already use list views for our corporate groups, and that works OK due to the fact that the members share a field value that is possible to actually group on.
Campaign functionality is already used to manage participants to meetings, so for us, this is already "reserved" for another purpose - even though I have read that this could be a solution for creating semi-permanent groups of contacts.
I seem to have 2 possibilites on the table:
1. Create a new, custom tab for our organization called "Contact Groups" and hand-build functionality for creating and viewing the logical groups that each user creates. The problem is I am afraid I will paint myself into a corner where it becomes difficult to interface to some of the standard functionality in SF.
2. Duplicate the campaign tab (if that is at all possible to do) and customize it to fit the functionality we require for grouping (calling this tab "Contact Groups").
Option 2 seems to be following the path of least resistance, but I am very keen to hear if anyone has a better solution (or can confirm my hypotheses).
The end result is functionality to manage the following:
1. Create an ad hoc contact grouping relevant (and visible) to the individual only
2. Choose to share a grouping with other user groups in salesforce, or make public to all
3. Corporate lists of contacts that are maintained centrally, visible to all.
Thanks for any advice you can give
4 respuestas
Absolutely, Tagging is want you want to use. Salesforce has built in both personal and public tags that will accomplish exactly what you want. There is a limit to the number of unique personal tags, 500, and 1,000 for public tags so hopefully you won't need more than that. I agree with you that there's other ways to accomplish this through specific customization.
I haven't really used tags extensively so not sure how the reporting works on tags, I'd have to loook more closely at that. If Tags don't work for some reason, I would create a custom multi picklist field for your public grouping so a single field would give you the functionality of group tagging. How to do the personal tagging that way might be tricky as you might have to create a custom field for each user or something which only they can use.
However, in the end I think taggin is what you want and it will work for how you described what you want to do.
