Gain User Insight with List Views

If you’re a Salesforce Admin chances are you have created tons of list views for Accounts, Contacts and other objects for your users to use. I recommend you take some time to create list views for YOU to use. You’ll find that they can help you quickly access information–saving you valuable time and frustration. In fact, there are several areas in the Setup area where you can add list views. You can create custom list views for Permission Sets, Profiles, Users, Public Groups and Domains just to name a few.

In this post, I’m continuing my series on User Management Tips from one of my Dreamforce 14 presentations. I’m sharing ideas on how you can use Salesforce List Views on the User object to make you a more efficient admin.

User List Views

In list views, you can filter on almost every User attribute found on the user record such as Storage Used, Status, Roles, Profiles, Managers, even Last Login. Here are some common list views that I recommend you set up:

• Active Users
• Inactive Users
• Admin Users
• Frozen Users
• Users in each division or department.
• Users by license type (ie Marketing Users, Content Users)

In addition, to the above list views you may want to create list views that you can look at on a weekly or monthly basis to manage user adoption and data storage. Here are a few I recommend:

• Large Storage Users
• No Login This Week
• Password Expring Soon

In my last post I talked about adding custom fields to your User object. You can use those in your list view as well. Say for example, you created a custom field to track users for an add-on webinar product, you can create a list view of “Webinar Users”. This is very helpful when you need to report on users or send a mass communication out to the users of that product. Other common list views on custom fields include users by cost center or mobile device users.

Filter Out Inactive Users

One of the most common user management complaints that I hear is that you cannot delete a User from Salesforce. Instead you can only make them active or inactive. Not being able to delete a User is actually a good thing as it helps maintain any historical information about that user, including completed tasks and prior record ownership. But most of the time if a user is Inactive an Admin doesn’t want to see them in the list of users. That’s why for all of my User list views I filter out inactive users. All you have to do is set the “Active” field to equal “True”. Now, those inactive users never, ever show up on my views–they’re as good as dead to me.

Because I occasionally do need to see inactive users and you probably do as well, I do recommend creating one list view called “Inactive Users” where the “Active” field equals “False”.

List View Visibility

As with all list views, you can opt to have user list views visible only to you, to all users or share with certain groups of users. Most of these list views you’ll want to share only with other Admins.

It Slices and Dices

As you can probably tell, I love list views! I find them much faster than reports for managing my daily admin workload as I can jump from one view to another instantly. I can customize the columns on the fly if need be and quickly drill-down and view and edit the records I need to work on. I also like that I can click on column headers to quickly sort and filter by values. The one big gotcha though is you cannot do inline edit on the user list view. Be sure to vote for this idea as it will be a huge time-saver for editing multiple users at once.  Even without this, user list views should be in your user management arsenal.

#SMT