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
Field service organizations operate in some of the most demanding environments in business. Technicians are constantly working in the field far from the office, and depending solely on their mobiles for real-time information to get the work done right. Having the right data at the right moment is not just helpful. It is essential.
Agentforce Field Service is built for exactly this kind of work, connecting your workforce, your customers, and your data on a single platform. But here is the challenge. Field service work does not always happen in places with reliable network coverage. Technicians work in remote locations, underground facilities, and areas where signal can drop without warning. When a device loses its connection, access to Salesforce goes with it. A brief outage can disrupt an entire day of work.
This is the problem that Offline Briefcase is designed to solve. Offline Briefcase gives your field service team access to the records they need, even when there is no network connection available. Instead of relying on a live connection to Salesforce, the data they need is already downloaded and ready to go on their device – so your technicians can keep working and stay productive regardless of what is happening with their signal.
Get Started with Offline Briefcase
Salesforce Field Service Mobile comes with basic offline support out of the box. This means that when a technician loses connectivity, they can still access a limited set of records on their device. For many teams, though, this is not enough. They need access to more records, and they need the ability to choose exactly which ones are available offline.
That is where Offline Briefcase shines, by allowing admins to decide exactly which records get stored on a mobile worker's device. Instead of relying on the default offline behavior, admins can build customized briefcases that contain only the objects and records their team actually needs. It’s like handing every mobile worker their unique briefcase in the morning, containing just the right tools needed for the work that they do.
From a technician's perspective, the experience is simple. While their device is connected, it automatically syncs their briefcase in the background. By the time they head out to a job, the records are already downloaded and ready to go in their Field Service app. And when they lose connectivity on the job, nothing changes on their end.
They can still open, view, and update their briefcase records just like normal. Any changes they make are saved locally on the device and synced back to Salesforce automatically once they are back online. The result is an experience that just works. Admins get control over what data is available, and technicians get the confidence of knowing their information is always there when they need it.
A Briefcase for Every Need
One of the most powerful things about Offline Briefcase is the ability to tailor briefcases to specific groups of workers. By filtering the briefcase, admins make sure that workers see only what matters to them. Here are a few ways admins can scope a briefcase:
- Assign it to a specific mobile worker
- Assign it to a group of workers, like a regional team or a specialty crew
- Apply filters to limit records by location, record type, or any other field
- Include only the objects that are relevant to that team's work
Offline Briefcase also goes beyond the standard set of objects that come with Salesforce Field Service, like Work Orders and Account. So if your organization tracks data in a custom object, it can be made available offline just like any other record.
For example, imagine a company that tracks equipment using a custom object called Transformer Units. Because that object was created specifically for their business, it is not part of the standard data model and would not be available offline by default. With Offline Briefcase, an admin can add Transformer Units to a briefcase and make that data available to technicians in the field, even without a connection.
And best of all, every briefcase is entirely flexible. If a briefcase no longer reflects what a team needs, an admin can go in and update it at any time. New objects can be added and unused ones can be removed so your briefcase can grow and change alongside the needs of the team.
Level Up Your Offline Experience
Records in your Offline Briefcase are not just for viewing. Because they are always available on the device, they can also be used in flows and mobile toolkit extensions.
A flow is an automation tool in Salesforce that guides users through a series of steps to complete a task. For example, an admin might build a flow that walks a technician through a safety checklist before starting a job. If that flow references records from a briefcase, it can run completely offline. This means your automated processes keep working reliably even when there is no signal.
But that is not where the story ends. Performance Priming takes the offline briefcase experience even further by making the sync itself smarter and more efficient. Rather than downloading a wide window of data and trimming it down later, Performance Priming uses offline briefcases to target exactly the records and metadata each worker's profile needs, and keeps that data fresh by syncing the most critical changes every five minutes. Because syncing is so targeted, workers also get the ability to download far more records for offline work than standard priming
Together, offline flows, custom objects, and Performance Priming make Offline Briefcase a flexible and powerful tool for any field service organization. It is not just about keeping the lights on when connectivity drops. It is about giving your team a consistent, reliable experience no matter where they are working.