Overcoming the Salesforce Tab Limit

Most Salesforce orgs have a limit to the number of custom “Tabs” that they can have. Currently, the limit is 5 for Group, 10 for Professional and 25 for Enterprise. Throw in a few custom objects and websites and it is easy to hit the ceiling on Tabs.

Fortunately there is an easy way to get to an objects Home page without using one of your precious few tabs.

Instead of a tab at the top you can easily add quick links to the left side-bar of your Salesforce screen that takes the user to the desired page.

The first thing to do is to get the secret Entity ID to your custom objects home page. This is easy to do. Just go to ANY record for your custom object. Look at the URL and take note of the first three characters after “Salesforce.com”.

In this example, it is “a03”

Two items of note, alpha characters are case-sensitive and zero (0) and O are really, really hard to tell apart. To reduce the likelihood of error I like to copy and paste.

Now that you have your secret code to your custom object it’s time to create a custom link. Go to Setup>>Customize>>Home>>Home Page Components and click {Edit} next to “Custom Links”

Enter a new Bookmark name to display and then the URL to link to. The URL only needs to contain the 3 digit Entity ID. You should remove the first part of the url that references the specific server (In this example I omitted https://na14.salesforce.com). This will allow your link to work even if you are moved to a new Salesforce server.

I also like to add “/o” to my link so it takes the user to the “Recent Items” view for the object and it displays the object name at the top. It works without the “/0” but that takes the user to their last List View.

So in this example, all I place in the URL to link to field is /a03/o

Now I make sure my “Custom Links” are displaying on the home page layout by going to “Home Page Layout” edits. I check the box next to “Custom Links” to display and indicate the order the narrow components should be in.

If you don’t want every user to see the link or you want different links for different groups there are ways to add Custom “Components” to different page layouts. For this example, we’re keeping it simple with just one group of “Custom Links”.

Viola! Now my links to my custom objects display on the left-side navigation for every page I visit just like a tab would display across the top on every page.

Clicking the link will take me directly to that objects home tab, as shown below, where I can now see my recent items and run any list view.

Note: If you don’t see the home page components on all pages then go to Setup>>Customize>>User Interface>>Settings and check “Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages”.

You can do this same thing for links to standard objects, Visualforce pages, and other web pages.

One very popular use for custom links is to link to the Activities tab. For your reference that is Entity ID number “/007”. Many users find it nice to have quick links to “My Open Activities” or “Today’s Activities”. That allows them to jump to activity list views without having to go to the Home Page.

What will you link to?

-SMT