Salesforce Features
Workflow and Approvals
On-Demand Workflow to Power All Your Processes
- Automate all your business processes
- Run your entire business with greater efficiency
- Improve accountability and response time
- Integrate across multiple systems with real-time messaging
With Winter ’07, Apex
pushes the envelope on business process enablement in an on-demand environment.
Your workflow rules can now act on records and change field values, enabling
new levels of process automation, control, and consistency. Workflow also
supports outbound messages to enable real-time
integration to external systems. Winter ’07 introduces a flexible approvals
engine, which allows you to build single-step or multistep approval processes
on virtually any standard or custom object.
This feature is
available in Enterprise and Unlimited Editions.
Training and Documentation
- Release Notes (PDF)
- Tips on Getting Started with Approvals (PDF)
- Useful Approval Process Examples (PDF)
- New Feature Workshop (Live Virtual Classroom)
Feature Details
- Approval Process Automation: Create simple or sophisticated multistep approval processes to automate virtually any business process in your company, such as sales discount requests, opportunity close approvals, expense reports, or vacation requests.
- State Changes and Calculations: You can use workflow’s new field update capability to automatically change the value in a field—including owner and record type fields—as a result of a workflow trigger. Use the powerful Apex formula language to update field values based on results of calculations.
- Event-Driven Integration with Outbound SOAP Messages: With Winter ’07, you can send a customizable XML message to any desired Web-available listener. Eliminate the need to poll the Apex API for changes.
- Filter Enhancements: Workflow and approvals support advanced “OR” filters similar to those available in reports, special date values such as “Next 25 Days” and “Last Week,” and the ability to use standard and custom fields from the user object when creating workflow rules.
- More Workflow Rules: With the Winter ’07 release, you can create up to 300 workflow rules per object for your organization.

4 Comments
January 8
Thank you for this feature.
January 10
What will fire first: a Territory Rule or a Workflow Field Update rule?
In other words, could I base a Territory Rule on a field that is only set by Workflow Field Updates?
January 26
Territory assignment rules (as well as lead and case assignment rules) fire first. Therefore, if a workflow field update changes the value in a field, that new value will not be evaluated to determine new ownership or territory of the record.
March 1
Looks very sweet. Darned if I can figure a way to trigger on a field change though. IE - if a date field gets entered or updated, send the email. The triggers are based on ANY field edit - which worries me that I'll get a bunch of alerts when I turn on the rule...