Over the course of time, certain features fall out of favor or become obsolete to a point that they become useless. I’m discovering this to be true in our beloved Salesforce as well. With every new Salesforce org I setup, there’s a checklist of features that should be enabled, or disabled based on “best practices” and I find myself wondering why some of these settings and features are even still a part of the platform.

What started out as a Twitter poll on Social Accounts & Contacts (which we’ll look at below), turned into a conversation where my fellow Tweeters sounded off on the Salesforce features that are on their “most useless” list. Let’s take a look!

Social Accounts & Contacts

When Social Accounts and Contacts came out in the Winter ’14 release, it was pretty cool. The idea was to provide a personal and social element to records – after all, Salesforce was selling the concept of a “Social Enterprise” so it was only fitting that this feature was released. While good in concept, I found it to be painful to use.

Salesforce didn’t make any attempt to automatically query social networks to see if matching profiles could be found, and there was no option to log into a corporate level account which could be used globally, requiring a user to log into their own social network, and find the Account, Contact or Lead.

Do you use the @Salesforce Social Accounts, Contacts and Leads feature in your org? #awesomeadmin #askforce

— Brent Downey (@brentdowney) January 13, 2016

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
To me, the amount of space that the Social Accounts & Contacts took up on a record detail was noise – especially if it wasn’t being used, and Admins across Twitter seemed to agree.

Homepage Dashboard

@brentdowney The top row of dashboard on home page

— Ryan Lorenzen (@RyanLorenzen) January 15, 2016

Salesforce Classic’s homepage has long been a point of contention, specifically the dashboard snapshot. While Lightning Experience provides a much better and more useful Homepage experience, Salesforce Classic’s Homepage remains unchanged.

The Homepage dashboard snapshot only shows three components of a selected dashboard – and not just any three components, it’s always the top three components. The only way to customize what displays on the snapshot is to modify the dashboard.

If you want to see the full dashboard, there isn’t a quick link provided – you have to click into the Dashboard’s tab, search for the appropriate dashboard and potentially refresh before getting to the full data set. So, while most organizations leave the Homepage Dashboard enabled, I choose to remove it entirely.

Homepage Activity Defaults

@brentdowney homepage activity to do list defaulting to ‘overdue’ is an odd choice I think

— Kristi Guzman (@KristiForce) January 15, 2016

Here’s a default setting that I never understood. On the Salesforce Homepage, in every new org, the My Tasks section defaults the task list to only display Overdue items! I never understood why this default setting was made, and why it hasn’t been changed.

Most organizations are proactive, not reactive. And the whole point of a task list is to see what needs to be done – not what should have been done. This is one of the very first things I have users change when I do trainings – update the list to show Next 7 Days + Overdue.

Stay in Touch

@brentdowney stay in touch

— Daniel Hoechst (@dhoechst) January 14, 2016

Alright, now here’s a feature that makes sense – I can understand the premise. For those that aren’t aware of the feature, Stay in Touch enables a Salesforce user to send an email to a contact, asking them to verify the contact information on file. When it was deployed, which based on my research, is probably in the early days of Salesforce, it was probably pretty useful.

But now email is a tricky place to navigate. Bots are ever present, scanning our emails for the dreaded SPAM and, while probably an interesting feature in the early days, just doesn’t cut it today. The email template used isn’t customizable, has the Salesforce branding on it, and if there is an error or update to the contact information, there isn’t an update or write back to Salesforce feature – the issuing rep must manually update the record.

To eliminate confusion and prevent your companies domain from being flagged for high volumes of SPAM, I suggest turning this default feature off. If it’s a needed feature, look at creating a company-branded email template that users can select and send instead. Same functionality but more customizable.

System Generated Chatter Feed Posts

@brentdowney system generated feed posts

— Steve Williams (@MrSteve_W) January 14, 2016

Chatter is a very useful tool for many organizations. Personally, I’m a Chatter champion. But if Chatter isn’t managed well, it can become noisy. System generated feed posts don’t help reduce noise at all.

For example, let’s say that I’m updating a Chatter group description because I found a typo. That action generates a system generated Chatter post to the group. By default, Chatter feed tracking is enabled for some of the standard objects as well, but most System Admins don’t take the time to update the tracking settings to include meaningful information (or turn off feed tracking where it’s not necessary).

Quick Create

@brentdowney quick create for sure. And the scariest. Even @parkerharris knows the evilness of it. & the old setup menu & profile page

— Rachel Natik (@RachelNatik) January 15, 2016

Quick Create was mentioned a few times by several folks on Twitter, but I chose this Tweet to represent the others because of Rachel’s comment! For those that don’t know, Quick Create allows users to quickly create Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities from the sidebar.

Sounds nice until you learn that records created through quick create don’t follow any of your beautifully crafted data validation rules which means that these records can be full of dirty data.

Now, I have heard, from Parker Harris’ very own mouth that this is a piece of functionality that served a purpose and is now “evil” as Rachael puts it, yet it’s still available! If this is active in your org, turn it off right now!

Luckily, there’s an alternative to Quick Create that I like a lot more, and that’s Publisher Actions. Admins can create publisher actions where users can create records using an abbreviated form, but these forms still follow validation rules!

Big Deal Alert

@brentdowney big deal alert

— Stacey Cogswell (@Stay_Sea_) January 14, 2016

Big Deal Alerts are interesting because I can see the value of this feature – for Professional Edition orgs. PE orgs don’t include Workflow Rules, so big deal alerts could prove to be one of the only options available to notify management of large deals in the organization.

For the remainder of the customers on Enterprise Edition or higher, workflows and Process Builder proves to be a much better and far more flexible solution. For example, Big Deal Alerts are triggered when a dollar value threshold or probability is reached. But what if you need or want to send an email when a different variable is met? It can’t be done with Big Deal Alerts.

Workflow Rules can enable a much richer experience, tailored to your organization. Better yet – leverage Process Builder to create a Chatter post and tag a specific individual or individuals in a Chatter post to drive engagement and reduce emails!

Don’t agree with this list or have something to add? Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it!