A Salesforce Admin’s Out of Office Checklist

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It’s Monday and for the next few weeks I will be on the road. I’m looking forward to meeting AwesomeAdmins at the Salesforce World Tour London on May 21st and Washington DC Admins on May 28th. With all of these upcoming trips I had to prepare to make sure that my team could stay in touch with me and understand timelines for responses. As I was thinking of this I know that Admins are mobile too. With summer vacations starting to ramp up I decided to help you by making a quick checklist to help you get out of the office fast and on to some summer treats.

1. Mass email your users

Chances are your users don’t know- or might not know- when you will be out of the office. Now is the time to tell them. To do this I created a sample email template for you.

Greetings {!User.FirstName}!
With the summer vacation season in full gear I wanted to remind you when I will be out of the office and where you can go for support.

I will be out of the office from [START DATE] to [END DATE]. During this time I will not be checking email. However, if you need Salesforce Assistance- please send me an email which will be answered when I return OR contact: [CONTACT PERSON].

I hope you have a wonderful day!

2. Change your Chatter profile picture. 

I like this idea because it’s a good visual reminder that you are unavailable. Now a good alternative to doing this, or in addition to doing this would be installing the Out of Office Notification for Chatter app, but since we don’t have time to train our users on it- and it would be selfish to to use it just for ourselves- we will go with changing our profile picture.

3. Set your out of office email message.

If you don’t already read Chris Brogan’s blog, you should. Specifically if you are setting your email out of office, you need to read this post. After I first read his post, that’s how I set my out of office message.

4. Install SalesforceA

If you have not installed the new Salesforce Admin app- Stop reading and do that. Here is the link. If you have already installed it, have you logged in? Do all that. Because I promise you there will be a few users who missed your email, and are completely oblivious to your Chatter picture. They will- mark my words- forget their password, lock themselves out, or both.

That’s it. Ok, so what do you do before you leave the office?

 

 

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