Action Categories

Actions fall into several 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 Salesforce predefined actions to get you and your users started using actions in your organization. Add default actions to publisher layouts to make them available to your users in the full Salesforce site and the action bar in the Salesforce app.

In organizations that are created after Winter ‘14, Salesforce adds default actions to the global publisher layout and to the publisher layout on account, case, contact, lead, and opportunity objects. In organizations that were created before Winter ‘14, default actions are available in the palette on the page layout editor, but they’re not automatically added to publisher layouts.

Since our Development organization is new, it contains a set of default actions. You can check out the default global actions: From Setup, enter Global Actions in the Quick Find box, then select Global Actions.

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

Mobile smart actions

Mobile smart actions are a set of preconfigured 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 the Salesforce app.

In the Salesforce app, the Mobile Smart Actions element expands to a set of distinct create actions that enable users to create records directly in the feed.

Mobile smart actions are populated with all 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 change only if you change which fields on an object are required.

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

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” in the Salesforce Help.

Custom actions

Custom actions are actions that you create and customize yourself, such as Create a Record, Send Email, or Log a Call actions. They can also invoke Lightning components, flows, Visualforce pages, or canvas apps with functionality that you define. For example, you can create a custom action so that users can write comments that are longer than 5,000 characters, or create one that integrates a video-conferencing application so that 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.

Productivity Actions

Productivity actions are predefined by Salesforce and are attached to a limited set of objects. You can’t edit or delete productivity actions.