CRM Insights Blog

How are you managing your time-off? With your CRM system?

Over the years I have seen our customers come up with interesting uses for their CRM systems. Recently, one of my customers has started tracking employee time-off requests. The Salesforce CRM  users enter the dates that they wish to have off. Once entered, it goes through an approval process. To make it more efficient, I recently added a dashboard set that shows the status of their requests.

The "Time-off Manager" application, by Force.com Labs, is a free and available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Implementation is fairly straightforward the most difficult part is setting up the approval process.

It never ceases to amaze me all the possible ways that you can use Salesforce CRM within your organization. Consolidating all of your business processes into one application is no longer for those running SAP. Maybe it's time that you took a look at some of your internal processes and see if they can be addressed by Salesforce CRM and the AppExchange -- start by browsing through the AppExchange. If you have any questions regarding any of the applications you see, please post a "Reply" here and I will be happy to let you know if I have experience with it.

Salesforce Update: Set Colors for Picklist Values in Charts

With Winter '10, you can assign fixed colors to picklist values when shown in charts. Charts based on those picklists will always show the same color for particular picklist values in all charts in reports and dashboards across your organization. For example, if your team creates the same chart for every month, you can make sure that the groupings are always shown in the same color.

The following figure shows a dashboard with three charts grouped by opportunity stages. Fixed colors were assigned to the Stage picklist values so that the "Closed Won" stage is always shown in green and "Closed Lost" in red. Notice that even though another stage appears on the second chart, the assigned colors remain the same.

 

To assign colors to standard or custom picklist fields:

• Navigate to the fields page for your object. For example, for account fields, click Setup ➤ Customize ➤ Accounts ➤Fields. For custom objects, click Setup ➤ Create ➤ Objects, then click the name of an object.
• Click the name of the picklist you want to update.
• Click Chart Colors and select an option to assign colors to picklist values for use in charts:

• Assign fixed colors to all values assigns a fixed color to each value from the standard set of chart colors.
• Assign colors to values dynamically assigns colors when a chart is generated. The Chart Colors column shows "Assigned dynamically" for all colors. Assign fixed colors by editing picklist values.

Note: Chart colors aren't available for multi-select picklists, currency picklists, or Task Subject, Event Subject, and Opportunity Competitor picklists.

• To assign colors to individual picklist values:

• In the Picklist Values section, click Edit next to a value.
• In the Picklist Edit page, assign a color for use in charts by clicking the button. To assign a color dynamically when a chart is generated, click Assign color dynamically.
• Click Save.