User not receiving approval emails from Salesforce

In our today's blog we will discuss how and where to start troubleshooting when a user is not receiving approval emails. Approval emails are critical to any business especially when they are for Quote/Proposals.The approval process has a defined set of steps and approver's required for a record to be approved based on the criteria you define for a record to kick for approvals. 

Use Case:

123SFDC Org has an approval process defined for discounts. When a Quote is submitted with more than 40% discount, it goes through three tiers of approvals -> Approver1, followed by Approver2 and lastly Approver3. The last approver is not receiving any approval emails.  
Since the Quote has not been approved by the last approver,the Sales rep cannot submit the Quote to the Customer. 

In this scenario, I would first start by verifying the approval process. Should the approval email go to the third approval at all? Create some test quotes and kick the approval process. The approval related list will show who all are lined up in the approval process for this record. 

If your approval process is driven by the Role hierarchy then Approver 1 should not be higher in role than approver 2 and approver 2 should not be higher in role than approver 3. Approvers should have access to the related objects, apex class, controllers used to define the approval process. You can check their profile level access.   

Can the user see approvals in Salesforce?

Since the approver 1 and 2 are receiving emails, you know that the template is working fine. As an admin you can login as the user and look for approvals either on the home page or on the Quote/record itself. While you are troubleshooting the issue of why user is not receiving approval emails meanwhile you can always ask the user to approve it by logging in to the Salesforce because you don’t want to delay the Quote from not being sent out to the customer.

Send test and verify the email template

Go to your email template and send a test email.This is to check if the user receives the template in an email. 

Approver Settings on the User details page:

If you are not using role hierarchy for the approval process and you are using the Manager of the submitter or the Quote owner than you should verify if the user has a Manager defined on the user details also check the "Receive approval request emails" option. User will not receive any emails if the ‘Never ‘option is selected. 

Is your User receiving any emails from Salesforce at all?

Go to Setup -> Email Administration -> Test Deliverability 

Enter the user email address in the Test deliverability. The user should receive test emails from all the IP addresses of your Org. 

  

Sample email

Email Logs

Go to Setup --> Log--> Email Log Files

Email logs will help you to take a deeper dive into the email not received issue. You can track as far as last 30 days emails that are being sent out from Salesforce to the user.

Select the date range for which the user is not receiving any emails and submit the email log request. Don’t forget to specify your email address in the notification recipient box. You will receive a csv file with the log details. 

Don’t expect to receive the log file immediately. On an average it will take atleast 10 to 15 minutes to receive the log file depending on the number of emails that have been sent out to the user for the selected duration. Below screenshot gives brief explanation of the fields in the csv log file. 

Now if you do see emails being sent out to the user in the log file but the user is still not receiving emails than it could be an Outlook issue. You can try upgrading the Outlook to its latest version to see if this resolves the issue. 

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Salesforce Agile Accelerator Meetup

Built on force.com platform this tool has the ability to integrate with your Salesforce Apps, Service cloud data, Sales Cloud data, Objects etc. Because this tool lives in Salesforce, it becomes very convenient to track the Sprint work and get real time updates. Visually appealing graphs, Salesforce reports and dashboard, Chatter and User friendly UI makes this tool stand out in the market compared to its competitors. 

Use Case:

1-2-3 SFDC would like to track Sprint work for the Penguin Team. Given below are the roles for the Team Members.

Team Member: Role

1. Rico Penguin: BSA
2. Skipper Penguin: QA Engineer
3. Kowalski Penguin: Developer
4. Mason Penguin: Scrum Master
5. Mort Penguin: Product Owner
6. Sfdc Beginner: Business Owner 

Salesforce Login:

It is important that all the team members must have Salesforce Login to get started with Salesforce agile Accelerator.

Salesforce Developer Sandbox

Create your own Salesforce Developer Sandbox

https://developer.salesforce.com/signup

AppExchange:

Go to Salesforce AppExchange and download Salesforce Agile Accelerator

 https://appexchange.salesforce.com/  

Users:

Create your team in the Salesforce. Users can belong to any profile or roles. Salesforce Agile Accelerator does not require users to below to a particular role or profile. 

Security:

Users can be assigned to admin or user permission set. Generally Scrum Master is admin and team members are assigned user permission set.

Create your Team

Give unique name to your Team and specify the Story Points.  Story Points define the level of efforts required to work on a user story. This can be either Tshirt size of Small, Medium, and Large or a series of numbers that have hours or days assigned to them. 

Allocation (%) defines availability of your team member for this Sprint. If the team member is out of office for one day then the allocation would be 90%. 

Product Tag:

Product Tags are used to arrange or categorize your work. For example if your team is working on diverse projects Sales, Marketing, Tele business, Support. Then create product tags to categorize the work. 

Assignment Rule:

When a work is created it automatically gets assigned to the assignee that is defined in the assignment rule.  As shown below click on the << to update the assignment rule. 

Sprints:

This tab provides the details of the current Sprint as well as the previous Sprints - Start Date, End Date and the remaining days for the Sprint to be closed. 

Team dependency:

User stories or work that has dependency on other teams can be defined here. 

Salesforce Agile Accelerator Q & A

Q1: We have users who do not work in Salesforce or who are non-Salesforce users. Do we have to purchase additional Salesforce licenses?

It is must for all the users to have access to Salesforce in order to use this tool. Non Salesforce users will have to be created in Salesforce. If you can manage using developer Sandbox than I don’t see any reason to purchase additional licenses.

Q2: Ours is a developer team and we are currently using GITHUB to track our Sprint work. With Git hub we can track the code changes. Does Salesforce Agile accelerator provide this ability?

I am not sure. I am still exploring this tool and in this process, I haven’t found this feature in Agile Accelerator yet.

Q3: Do we have the ability to change the Burn down chart from hours to Story Points?

I am not sure although, I know there are standard reports provided by Salesforce for agile accelerator that has burn down chart reports and these can be customized using filters.

Q4: When a Task is assigned to a team Member does the team member receive any notifications?

Yes, also chatter provides real time updates like XYZ task has been assigned to “Rico”. You can also customize chatter for additional features.

Q5: Our team only works on defects, how can we define this work?

Yes this is possible by creating record type on work object. For example- you can create User story, Bugs, Defects, Projects, enhancements etc.

Q6: If I assign more work to a team member does that reflect in chart? And if the team member completes that task in half the time then what happens?

Burn down chart  shows the current number of hours assigned to a team member and the availability is shown with the blue color. Take an example that Rico has been assigned 40 hours of work and he is available to take 20 hours of more work. Now Rico finishes a 10 hours of task in 5 hours. Then his assigned work shows 35 hours and availability updates to 25.v

Salesforce Agile Accelerator - Part 1

Hands on with Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Product Tags

Systematically arrange your work by classifying them into catalog/categories using Product Tags. Take an example that as a business analyst you are working on a project that impacts multiple departments like Sales, Support, Tele business, Marketing etc. Team members will be divided to work on each areas. To differentiate your work and help the team to identify the work from the product backlog you can use unique product tags for each category. 

Create your Product Tags:

 While creating Teams you can directly type Product tag. Once you type the name and save the Teams form it will automatically save the name under “Product Tags” Tab.

I tried assigning a new product tag for an existing team which already has a product tag assigned. I received following error which means that Salesforce Agile Accelerator does not allow members outside the team to make any changes to the team once the team has an existing active product tag.

  

Click on the Product Tag to explore more options

Assignment Rule for Product Tags:

Assignment Rule will automate the work assignment for the teams based on the product tag. This may sound familiar like creating assignment rules for Leads in salesforce, the concept is very similar although creating assignment rules for Product tags is different and much easier in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Navigation:

Go to Product Tags tab-> click on the product tag-> click on the <<  and this should open a new window. If you would like to create a new Assignment rule then click on “Create New Button”

Please Note: Create New Button will not be visible for you, if you donot belong to a team that has the product tag assigned. For example I am logged in as SFDC Beginner.  I don’t see “Create New” option for product tags “1-2-3 Marketing Team” because I am not part of either the team assigned to the product tag. 

“Create New” button  is visible for “Tele business” product tag, because I am part of this team. 

For example, in 1-2-3 sfdc all the Production P1/High Priority issues should be assigned to a senior member of the team “Rico Penguin”.  

Assignment Rule:

Click on create new assignment rule, and fill the user names for assignee, product owner, followers etc..

Required fields to save the assignment rule are product owner and assignee. Once you hit save then you can customize the assignment rule with more options. 

Click edit on the assignment rule and observe the page. To make the work assignment more manageable, Salesforce has added more options to the assignment rule like who will be the assignee if the severity of the ticket/ user story is 1, 2 ,3 etc.

 

Salesforce Agile accelerator will prompt you to choose the team if you belong to more than one team.

Assignment rule concept is very similar to few ticket management applications, for example ‘Service Now”. In this application if an Incident is submitted with P1 Category the ticket is automatically assigned to the department and a notification is sent to higher management. Similarly in Salesforce Agile Accelerator when a work that belongs to this product tag will have severity 1 it will automatically assign it to the defined assignee and will send real time updates to the followers.

In the next post we will learn how to create Sprints in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Thank you once again for visiting my blog.