Salesforce.com Exposed -
Business Intelligence

Out of the box, Salesforce.com provides an excellent library of reports. These standard reports cover all of the major CRM software modules within the system including, accounts & contacts, opportunities, sales, leads, support and campaigns. Salesforce.com also provides a flexible report writer that uses a wizard based approach to walk users through the creation of new reports. Depending on the user’s level of experience the wizard will either be “loathed or loved”. Some respondents commented that there were occasions when the generation of reports was delayed by up to 24 hours. We were unable to replicate this issue during our own testing as it may be an issue specific to certain customers, environments or possibly related to data volumes.

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Salesforce.com provides a good selection of dashboards to display data at a summary level and are typically presented in charts or gauges. The dashboards are easily managed and edited by individual users. The only significant issue noted by respondents relative to the dashboards is that the Salesforce.com security structures established are not automatically applied to the data presented in the dashboards. Each dashboard must specify the name of a “User” (the running user). This is not automatically inferred by the user accessing the dashboard but instead security is derived from the “running user” associated with the dashboard. Therefore, it’s quite possible that even if the Salesforce.com security environment prohibits a user from seeing certain information, it could still be visible through a dashboard.

Salesforce.com offers some workarounds to solve this in their help materials:
“Because dashboards are assigned a Running User, if you want to have a personalized dashboard for each user in a group of people you need to create a separate dashboard for each user in the group. You can do this by creating a dashboard for one user in the group and then cloning that dashboard for each other user, setting the Running User appropriately for each dashboard.

If you want to create a separate dashboard for each user and have it only visible to that user. You will need to create group containing only that user then create a separate folder that is shared to just that user group. Within that dashboard folder you can then create a dashboard with the running user as that user you shared it to.”

Whether these proposed workarounds are maintainable within a specific implementation will require evaluation and is likely to depend on the number of users and/or dashboards in use.

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