Storing Documents in SalesForce Tips
By Annemaria Duran
[salesforce form=”4″]SalesForce is a great tool designed to help track leads and associate documents with the correct clients, contacts, and leads. Here are a few tips for connecting documents to your items in SalesForce.- Make sure that your permissions in SalesForce are current and reflect the level of authority that your organization needs.
- Identify if documents are internal or external. If an internal document, then mark internal availability in SalesForce so that it cannot be shared externally by accident. This is especially important in avoiding possible liability, public embarrassment, and risk to corporate reputation.
- Check to make sure that the document size does not exceed 5MB. SalesForce does not allow for larger documents. If your document is larger, then consider storing the document in a separate location and storing the link to the document in SalesForce.
- Check to make sure that the “Don’t allow HTML uploads such as attachments or document records” security setting is correct. If this security setting is enabled for your organization, SalesForce will prohibit the uploading of .htm, .html, .htt, .htx, .mhtm, .mhtml, .shtm, .shtml, .acgi, and .svg file extensions. By disabling this feature, these additional document types will be allowed as document types in SalesForce.
- Keep your document names to 255 characters or less.
Tips and Tricks for Common Issues in SalesForce Document Management
- Searching documents within Salesforce? This is an extremely limited function, but it does allow for full text searches within the document and needs to be performed by an admin SalesForce account.
A strong alternative to searching directly within SalesForce is to utilize the eFileCabinet integration with SalesForce for storing and recalling documents. This allows for quick and thorough searches that have extremely similar accuracy and intuition to a Google search.
- Separating out notes for clients, specific to a document or item, but which also need to remain confidential, is an important but difficult task within SalesForce. The way to do it is to store notes under the action items and contact or activity sections. The limitation here is that notes are not attached to specific documents, rather they will pull together as a large block note, which makes parsing through the information tedious.
An easier way to perform this is through the eFileCabinet document management software. With eFileCabinet, you will be able to store time-stamped notes particular to a single client, individual documents, folders, and other items. These comments remain internal and are not transmitted onto the original document.
- A question we come across a lot is how to pull documents out of SalesForce if you chose another document management software. SalesForce does not have an easy export feature, which is a common pain among document management software.
Alternatively, by utilizing the eFileCabinet integration with SalesForce, you can access eFileCabinet directly and export in a simple and quick step. These documents will export into a windows folder structure with full organization.
- How can I manage my retention policy within SalesForce? Unfortunately this is not an option if you are using SalesForce solely. SalesForce is not a document management system and so creates some regulatory risk if you are storing sensitive documents within SalesForce.
A good solution to this is offered by eFileCabinet. eFileCabinet does have a built-in automatic retention feature that allows you to customize your retention according to document type. It will manage your retention actions and timelines and notify you when an item is ready to be purged.
- How can I protect a document from accidental deletion in SalesForce? The only way to do this is through user permissions. Unfortunately, you cannot restrict or protect individual items in SalesForce.
The best way to attain this functionality is, again, with the eFileCabinet integration. The documents, although stored through SalesForce, are actually managed by eFileCabinet. eFileCabinet will allow for protection of documents on an individual document basis, by levels or on a mass basis. This can occur in any direction within your documents.
In addition, by using eFileCabinet alongside SalesForce, your organization will not need to pay for additional SalesForce space. The documents stored in eFileCabinet can be housed in the Cloud or on your server. There are many additional benefits of using both eFileCabinet and SalesForce together. Fill out the form below to learn more.