Reporting and Dashboards Blog - July 2008

• Want to speak at Dreamforce?

  Thomas Tobin Jul 22, 2008

   

  Right now, the nomination and selection processes for speakers at Dreamforce is open.

  If either:

  • You feel like others could benefit from your experience of using the set of features to deliver value to your co-workers

  or

  • You want to school all these punks in how to really use salesforce.com

  you can either talk to the employee you normally deal with, or go to:

  http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF08/callforspeakers.jsp

  where you can enter your details. Not everybody is chosen, you should enter what you are comfortable talking about, maybe with examples so that the coordinators can see what you are ready to cover.

  Generally, we prefer people who have the former view of why they should be there over the latter. Speakers get not only a "tricked out namebadge" (worth less than the price of a new pair of shoes, or $581, whichever is lower) but also other stuff at DreamForce (like free entry).

  You'll also get people coming up to you afterwards, asking how you did things.

  If you want to know what goes on at Dreamforce, what it's like, and what to expect, you can also talk to one of the local user groups - you might also want to talk to your user group coordinator and ask them if what you are thinking of would go down well at Dreamforce, since the local user group meetings are like mini-Dreamforces themselves.

  There aren't just sessions about analytics planned at Dreamforce this year, so pipe up and get ready to get on stage and screen.

   

  (Image on the left is from one of progessive insurance's commercials, for everybody outside the US who hasn't seen it - it's the 5th one down on the list here)

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• Opportunity history - the snapshot you get for free

  Thomas Tobin Jul 9, 2008

   

  When talking with some of you about Analytic Snapshots, I've found many people didn't know that there's already a snapshot done of your opportunities every 1st of the month. Working with this and looking at if it can solve your pipeline visibility questions will tell you much about what you need in a snapshot, and if you need one.

   

  What is the opportunity history? Isn't that new in Summer'08?

   

  Well, there is opportunity field history. That's new. It's like the extension of case history and custom object history to opportunities. But it tracks every field that changes (at least, of the ones you select), and each field changed is a new record in that field history.

  So, change stage from 2 to 3, that's one line of opportunity field history

  Change stage from 2 to 3, amount from 1000 to 2000, and the owner from Pat to Bobby, and that's 3 change rows in opportunity field history.

  Opportunity history isn't like that. It will record 1 row, with all the changed values, for the values it saves.

  Opportunity history is shown on an opportunity detail page as the related list "Stage history".

   

  So what's opportunity history and opportunity trends?

   

  If you've looked at the report type list for opportunities, there are now three different report types:

  • Opportunity history
  • Opportunity field history
  • Opportunity trends

  So, the first one is the list of things visible as the "stage history" on the opportunity, and the second is the field history. What's the third?

   

  Opportunity Trends Report Type

   

  The opportunity trends report type gives you the status of your opportunities at the start of each month.

  You can see, for each 1st of the Month, for each Opportunity:

  • Historical Amount
  • Historical Stage
  • Historical Close Date
  • Historical Probability
  • As of Date
  • All opportunity fields as their current values

  For instance, you might make a matrix report, showing by Opportunity Owner role (vertically) and by date (horizontally) what was the amount. That report would show the evolution, for each 1st of the month, the total amount of the opportunities.

   

  So how is that different from an Analytic Snapshot?

   

  There are 3 main differences

  1. It only works on the 1st of each month - so you can't see trends as of the 3rd, or every Monday, or every 1st and 15th of a month. With and Analytic Snapshot, you can choose when it runs.
  2. It only records a set of fields, and you can't change them. With an Analytic Snapshot, you can control which fields, and even bring in fields not on opportunity.
  3. If you can see the Opportunity, you can see the trend data. With an Analytic Snapshot, you can do this, but you can also have history available to more or few users.

   

  What you can do:

   

  If you haven't already tried it, make a report using the Opportunity Trends report type, and group by "as of date". That will let you see back into the past, what your pipeline looked like over time.

  You might also want to make a report where you filter on "as of date" and then you can choose a month, and it will list the opportunities as they were at that date - whatever the values of stage, amount, close date, and probability were as of that date.

  Now, if this isn't enough - you want more fields tracked, you want snapshots done more than every 1st of the month, then follow the guide to create an analytic snapshot, and start building up your own history.

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