Salesforce allows you to organize tabs into groups. These groups, also known as apps, help reduce screen clutter and give you quicker access to the tabs that you use the most. For example, a marketing manager may rarely use the Cases or Opportunities tabs but spend most of her time looking at Campaigns and Leads.
With the Salesforce.com Force.com platform, your company can now create custom apps for more specific uses within customer relationship management (CRM) – or for anything else, for that matter. Sales reps can use an expense reporting app, and product managers can use a product release app to manage their product requirements. The mind-blowing part of all of this is that apps can be composed of standard tabs or custom ones that you create. Anyone in your company can benefit from sharing one set of data. And don’t worry if you’re not the most creative type. Salesforce.com has a bunch of prebuilt apps available (for free or for an additional charge), which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 19.
Discovering the app menu
In the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page, you can find the app menu (see Figure 3-5). The drop-down list allows you to switch between apps. You find some standard tab groupings, such as Sales and Call Center. Administrators can also add or create new apps to address what their specific users need to see. Don’t worry if you choose an app and see new tabs. You can always go back to the drop-down list, select your previous app, and have your familiar tabs return.
FIGURE 3-5: Choosing apps by using the Force.com app menu.
Uncovering the App Launcher
From the app menu, selecting the App Launcher option takes you to the App Launcher page where all your apps are now displayed as clickable tiles, as shown in Figure 3-6. Clicking a tile is the same as selecting that app in the app menu, as described in the immediately prior section. Depending on what other systems your company has integrated with Salesforce, you may also see installed app icons for other applications used at your company, like Gmail or Concur.
FIGURE 3-6: Viewing apps in the App Launcher.
Finding out about the tabs
In this section, we describe the major tabs in Salesforce and show you how to use the tab home pages to quickly access, manage, or organize information.
Each tab within Salesforce represents a major module or data element in an interconnected database. That’s as technical as we get.
In the following list, we briefly describe each of the standard tabs (as shown in Figure 3-7). We devote a chapter to each of the tabs mentioned here:
❯❯ Chatter (see Chapter 6): Manage all aspects of your collaboration efforts here. From the Chatter home page, you can view all updates to your feed, as well as search for people and groups to follow. If you don’t see this tab, you may not have Chatter enabled in your organization.
❯❯ Campaigns (see Chapter 15): Specific marketing efforts that you manage to drive leads, build a brand, or stimulate demand.
❯❯ Leads (see Chapter 7): Suspects (people and companies with whom you want to do business). But don’t start grilling your lead about where she was on the morning of July 23, because the only clue you’ll gather is the sound of a dial tone.
❯❯ Accounts (see Chapter 8): Companies with whom you currently do or previously did business. You can track all types of accounts, including customers, prospects, former customers, partners, and competitors.
❯❯ Contacts (see Chapter 9): Individuals associated with your accounts.
❯❯ Opportunities (see Chapter 10): The deals that you pursue to track transactions or drive revenue for your company. Your open opportunities constitute your pipeline, and opportunities can contribute to your forecast.
❯❯ Products (see Chapter 11): Your company’s products and services, associated with the prices for which you offer them. You can aggregate different products and their prices to your opportunities.
❯❯ Cases (see Chapter 13): Customer inquiries that your support teams work on to manage and resolve.
❯❯ Content (see Chapter 18): The sales and marketing collateral and documents that you use as part of your selling or service processes.
❯❯ Reports (see Chapter 23): Data analyses for you and your entire organization. Salesforce provides a variety of best practices reports, and you can build custom reports on the fly to better measure your business.
❯❯ Dashboards (see Chapter 24): Graphs, charts, and tables based on your custom reports. You can use dashboards to visually measure and analyze key elements of your business.
FIGURE 3-7: Navigating through the tabs.
Discovering a tab home page
When you click a tab, the tab’s interior home page appears. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears. The tab’s home page is where you can view, organize, track, and maintain all the records within that tab.
Do this right now: Click every tab visible to you.
The look and feel of the interior home pages never change, regardless of which tab you click (except for the Home, Reports, and Dashboards tabs). On the left, you have the sidebar with the Create New drop-down list, Recent Items, and (depending on your company and the tab) a Quick Create tool. In the body of the page, you have a View drop-down list, a Recent Items section related to whichever tab you’re on (for example, Recent Accounts), and sections for popular Reports and Tools (see Figure 3-8).
FIGURE 3-8: Deconstructing the tab home