Action Categories

Actions fall into four different categories. You may see some but not others, depending on the age and configuration of your organization.

Standard actions

Standard actions are actions that are included automatically when Chatter is enabled: Post, File, Link, Poll, and, in organizations that use work.com, Thanks. Standard actions can also include any you’ve created for your organization using point-and-click methods, such as create or log-a-call actions.

Default actions

Default actions are create actions—actions that allow users to create new records—that are automatically set up to make the process of configuring actions much simpler.

In organizations created after Winter ’14, these actions are automatically added to the default global publisher layout and to the default publisher layout on these objects:

• Account
• Case
• Contact
• Lead
• Opportunity

In organizations created before Winter ’14, these actions are available in the palette on the page layout editor for these layouts, but they’re not automatically added to any publisher layouts.

Since our Development organization is new, it contains a set of default actions. You can check out the default global actions in Setup at Create | Global Actions | Actions.

For a list of which default actions appear on which object, see “Default Actions Overview” in the Salesforce Help.

Mobile smart actions

Mobile smart actions are also a set of pre-configured actions, just like default actions, and are supported on the same list of objects. However, they appear in pre-Winter ’14 organizations and are displayed only in Salesforce1.

Mobile smart actions appear as a single element in the Publisher Actions section of the page layout editor. In Salesforce1, the Mobile Smart Actions element expands to a set of distinct create actions, which allow users to create records directly in the feed.

Mobile smart actions are automatically populated with all of your organization’s required fields on the relevant object, regardless of how many fields there are. For example, the New Case action in the mobile smart action bundle includes all required case fields. You can’t edit the fields on mobile smart actions; the fields that appear will change only if you change which fields on an object are required.

Mobile smart actions don’t appear in the publisher on any page in the full Salesforce site, regardless of which page layouts you add them to; they appear only to users in Salesforce1.

For more information on mobile smart actions, and a list of what the mobile smart action element on each supported object expands to include, see “Mobile Smart Actions Overview” in the Salesforce Help.

Custom actions

Custom actions are Visualforce pages or canvas apps with functionality you define. For example, you might create a custom action to let users write comments longer than 5000 characters, or one that integrates a video conferencing application so support agents can communicate visually with customers.

We’ll touch briefly on custom actions later in About Custom Actions, but you can find out much more about them in the “Adding Functionality with Visualforce Custom Actions” chapter of the Salesforce1 App Developer Guide.