Chatter on Reports and Dashboards

I bet a lot of you didn't know that you could turn on Chatter for reports and dashboards. This is one of my favorite quick little tips.

You can enable it with just a couple of clicks and then you instantly gain the ability to collaborate right in context about reports ("Does this have all the columns you need?") or dashboards ("Take a look at the Dashboard of Zeros, we have some data that needs cleanup!").

Shall I give you the step-by-step instructions?

Step One: Enable Feed Tracking

Go to Setup>Chatter>Feed Tracking and then select the Dashboard object. Click the Enable Feed Tracking checkbox and then Save.

(Repeat for the Reports object.)

That's it. There was just one step.

Using Chatter on Reports and Dashboards

Now that you've enabled it, simply go to a report or a dashboard—you may need to refresh your page—and you'll have a button that wasn't there before: a "conversation" icon. (It's subtle, but those are two speech balloons.)

Click that button and a Chatter pane opens from the right-hand side. Now you can post an update, @mention one of your colleagues, or respond to conversation right in context. This is also a great way for one of your colleagues to ask if they have questions about a report. Anyone they @mention will get a notification with a link directly to the report being asked about.

It doesn't get a much easier than that!

My Favorite Thing

Truly my favorite thing about using Chatter on reports and dashboards is that it removes a lot of the back-and-forth when someone asks about something that seems obvious to them but isn't to me. Like an email that says, "The dashboard looks like it needs updating." For the person that just sent me that email, it seems obvious which dashboard they are talking about. Perhaps, as far as they're concerned, their organization has only a single dashboard, or at least only one that gets used regularly. But I don't have much confidence in my ability to be sure which dashboard that might be. So I have to write back to ask. At that point they're likely to just give me a name, not even a link to the right dashboard. Names aren't always as unique as people think. So I still have to search around to be sure I'm answering what they are actually asking.

But if I get a Chatter question about a dashboard, I know exactly which one they mean. It's like an Easy Button to start the conversation.

[With a conversation about a dashboard, there are plenty of opportunities for confusion about which component and which underlying report they have questions about. But at least we've narrowed the focus...]

Also Useful in Other Places

I think Chatter is a very cool feature—and often underutilized. If you teach your users about it (plus enable it and put it on page layouts) Chatter is a great way to collaborate within Salesforce. And just like I mentioned above, it saves a lot of time figuring out which records people are talking about. So much better than copying the URL to send an email about a record!

Side Notes

Two things before closing out today:

Chatter might not last forever.

Salesforce doesn't seem to care that much about Chatter anymore, particularly since their acquisition of Slack. In fact, Parker Harris has said, half- (or less) jokingly, that he intends to kill Chatter. As with other Salesforce retirements/deprecations, I expect this will be a very very slow death. But I wanted to acknowledge this fact.

If/when Chatter is entirely replaced by Slack I have no idea how this kind of collaboration will change. And if your organization doesn't use Slack, I can't speculate what that would mean in your situation.

Make Sure Email Notifications Work!

In the Winter '24 release Salesforce made a change that required you to take action to ensure that notification emails about Chatter posts are sent. This flew under the radar for a lot of people, so you want to make sure that it's set properly in your org (or all of your client's orgs). If you start trying to collaborate on reports and dashboards using Chatter and the only notification people get is on the little bell in Salesforce upper-right toolbar you're going to have rather one-sided conversations!