After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
Groups are the main collaboration space in Chatter. You can organize a group around a project and add all project participants to it. Members use the group feed to exchange information, process a decision, and ask and answer questions. Whether it’s a project, a topic, a line of business, a what-have-you, you can create a group to support it. Groups help users build, preserve, and share knowledge that’s vital to getting the job done and keeping everyone aligned.
Salesforce provides group types for different purposes and audiences.
As an admin, you can rearrange the group layout to include or exclude some elements. For example, you can select to show the Broadcast Only option in the Create Group dialog or leave it out. If you don’t see a control that you expect to see when you create a group, you can adjust the group layout through Setup | Group Layouts.
All groups offer an Engagement tab for monitoring group membership and activity over time.
Use the Engagement tab to monitor how active the group is, the cadence of activity, the stability of group membership, and various count summaries. Counts include number of members, posts, questions, unanswered questions, likes, and comments.
When you set up Chatter for your company, create some starter groups that center around common interests and functional teams. For example, create product-related groups in research and development, sales, and marketing; set up groups for internal training, human resources, and facilities. Chatter groups make it easier to collaborate, manage projects, and stay current.
Here are some groups that have been successful at other companies. Remember, groups can be either public for every employee or private for select people.
All Company (public—internal facing)
Add all employees to this group, and use it to discuss company-wide topics and make announcements.
[Project Name] Team (private)
Add team members to this group so that they can collaborate on a project, give feedback, and share documents.
Competitive (public—internal facing)
Connect customer-facing employees with your company’s competitive and product experts so that the right people are talking to each other and sharing information.
Product Feedback (public)
Sales and customer service teams can provide client feedback directly to R&D and engineering.
Marketing (private)
Share concepts for creative campaigns, event details, and marketing ideas with the whole team.
Sales (public—internal facing)
Sales employees can share stories, strategies, and tips for winning.
[Customer Name] Meetings (private)
Create groups where all the key players on a deal can collaborate more easily on presentations, agendas, and products. For example, start a group for a customer visit called “Acme July Meeting” and invite sales, technical specialists, marketing, support, and engineering to align everyone.
[Department Name] Policies (broadcast—internal facing)
Provide a forum for broadcasting division, department, or team policies and inviting feedback from members. Though members can’t post, they can comment on posted items.
Let’s create two groups that are useful for most orgs: a public group that any authenticated user can join and a private group that allows customers in its membership. For both groups, we want to be able to associate records, like opportunities, accounts, and cases, with the group.
While you’re working through the content and hands-on challenges in this module, make sure that you’re logged in to your Trailhead Playground. Using your playground ensures that you aren’t changing data in your production org or posting to your company’s Chatter feed.
One type of group is the unlisted type. You can’t discover an unlisted group in a search. You must be invited to join an unlisted group. Making an unlisted group gives you a way to set up a private space for discussing sensitive material with a specific audience. For example, imagine that you want a place to discuss potential deals, compensation, or individual performance.
By default, the creation of unlisted groups is disabled. So, before we start creating groups, let’s go to Chatter Settings and enable unlisted groups.
To enable unlisted groups, you must have the permission Manage Unlisted Groups.
Create a public group named Volunteer Central. Volunteer Central is for sharing information about volunteer events.
Tip: After you create your group, the group email address appears under Group Email. You can see it here and in the right column of your group page. People with access to the group can use the address to post to the group feed through email.
When a Chatter group is archived, group members can’t post messages or share files with the group. However, previous posts, comments, and files remain available for reference. Mentioning a group (@[group_name]) doesn’t count as feed activity in that group and doesn’t delay group archiving. Group owners, group managers, and users with the permission Modify All Data can manually archive or edit the group’s automatic archiving settings at any time.
Congratulations! You’ve created your first group.
The group layout is the place to adjust the types of actions and settings that are available with groups. Let’s customize our group layout with an action that lets us create cases from the group.
This next step involves adding quick actions. This task is only available in the lightning Experience interface for Page Layout Editor. Currently, the Page Layout Editor tool is not accessible with Lightning Experience for screen reader users. We must use Salesforce Classic in order to work with the Page Layout Editor. Since Salesforce Classic doesn't have the ability to add quick actions, you will need to seek sighted assistance if you wish to follow along with the exercise. There is a quiz at the end of this reading, so your work here will not be checked in a challenge. The original Trailhead instructions from the unit have been included here.
You can arrange the order of the actions in the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions area by dragging and dropping. Let’s move the New Case action to the front of the list.
Nice work! You customized a group layout by adding a New Case action.
Now let’s look at our results in Volunteer Central.
There’s the New Case action on the group page.
You can also further customize the group by clicking Edit Group on the actions overflow menu. You can change a group’s image, name, details, and owner. You can search for and add more members, too.
Screen reader users, we'll continue from this point and create a private chatter group. Private Chatter groups are a great way for project teams to collaborate and share confidential information. Private groups can also have external members. For example, create a private group to collaborate with customers or subject matter experts who are outside your company.
When you select to allow customers in a private group, it’s clearly shown on the group page. The label, Private with Customers, appears below the group name. Always check for this statement! Let it guide the type of information that you share in this group.
You create a private group the same way that you create a public group, but you select a different group type.
After you create your group, it’s easy to add more members. Go to the group, open the actions menu in the group banner, and select Manage Members. In the Add Members dialog, search for the people that you want to add and press ENTER on Add next to their names.
You can also search for existing members and promote them to manager. Group managers enjoy the same rights and privileges as the group owner. Managers can edit the group, manage its membership, and perform other actions that are available to group owners. It’s a great way to share the responsibility of managing the group.
To promote a member to manager:
Now that you’ve mastered the art of groups, let’s explore how to get notifications in your feeds when values change on record fields. But first, let’s test your knowledge!
Click to return to the unit on Trailhead to complete the quiz at the end of the reading.