Apsona for Salesforce now supports Attachments, Notes, Tasks and Events for all objects of Salesforce, native and custom. You can now import, export, update and delete data into these objects. So, why is this functionality different, when it is already supported for the existing native and custom objects? Apsona treats Attachments, Notes, Tasks and Events as linked to specific Salesforce objects. For example, the Contacts object in Apsona, has its own Contact Notes, Contact Attachments, Contact tasks and Contact Events objects. Similarly, any object that has associated Task records in Salesforce has its own “surrogate” Task object in Apsona. This is extremely handy as when you import notes or tasks to a contact – it is automatically linked to the contact. All you need to provide is the Contact ID or Full name during the import. Similarly, you can manage the Task records associated with any object simply by using its associated surrogate Task object in Apsona.
With this functionality, the Apsona app is very useful to users for managing the organization’s file storage. Storage in Salesforce can be of two types – file and data. File storage includes files in attachments, the Documents tab, the Files tab, the File field, Salesforce CRM Content, Chatter (including user photos). The file storage limits for a Professional edition user is 612 MB, and for the Enterprise user, it is 2 GB. From what we have seen, Tasks and Attachments use up the storage limit rapidly. You might choose to treat this data as obsolete after a few years, and wish to delete it. The System Administrator can take stock of all the attachments, documents and archived tasks as they all count against storage. With the surrogate objects in Apsona, searching and filtering data to be deleted can be achieved with a few clicks. For example, let’s say you want to delete Contact tasks which are 3 years or older. Isolating such data from the Activities table in Salesforce – a single table which has all the tasks of all the objects in Salesforce can be very tedious. With Apsona, this task is simple, easy and quick. Here is how you would go about it:
- Go to Settings – Configurations, and bring the Contact Tasks object to the menu bar as described here.
- Create a filter by created date and user.
- Click Tools – Delete All
- Done!
You can now comb through each object for their Notes, Attachments, Tasks and Events, and free up a lot of used storage place, thus cutting down your costs.
Similarly you can manage your Documents too. A common use case with Documents is when a user leaves the organization and you want to transfer ownership to another user. You can do this with easily with Apsona. Get the Documents to the menu bar. Run a filter by author name. Click Tools – Update All. When you choose the Author field all the users in the org will dropdown as values. Select the user and click Update All. All the Documents will now have the new owner as the author.
These are just a few use cases we have covered in this blog. We hope you find this functionality useful and we would love to hear about your use cases. If you have not installed Apsona for Salesforce, do download it from the AppExchange and try it out.
