Salesforce Chatter Feed Tracking

We are going to learn Feed Tracking in this Post!

What is Feed Tracking anyways?

Feed Tracking allows users to see updates for objects and records that they follow in their chatter feed.

Example?

A Sales user at 1-2-3 SFDC is interested in enabling Chatter on the opportunity and contacts. User is also interested in receiving field updates on his chatter post if certain fields change on the records that he follows on the contacts and opportunities.  

How can I enable Feed tracking? 

Go to Setup ->Chatter->Feed Tracking

Section 1: On the Left pane you will find the list of objects available for feed tracking. The tracked column shows the number of fields currently being tracked under that object.

Section2: Check the box of “Enable Feed Tracking” (As shown in Section 2)  

Section3: Once you check mark this box all the fields available under this object becomes available for the field tracking. You can select up to 20 fields on an object for field tracking. (As shown in section 3)

You can also enable feed for all the related objects. You will find this option available at the bottom of every field tracking page.

What Objects can I enable Feed Tracking for?

Feed Tracking can be enabled for the following:

Standard Objects: accounts, article types, assets, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, dashboards, events, leads, opportunities, products, reports, solutions, and tasks.

Users, Chatter groups, topics, custom objects, external objects

How does Feed Tracking work?

Take an example of contacts. Feed Tracking has been enabled by your admin for contacts. You are a sales user and following few records that you do not own, and you would like to be notified on chatter regarding the changes made by other users on certain fields like phone, address, name etc. 

What Fields you can’t track?

·        Rollup summary fields

·        Auto-number

·        Formula Fields

·        Expected Revenue field on opportunities

·        Solution Title and Solution Details fields on solutions

Feed Tracking Challenges:

If your organizations Community Site users/ Partner Portal users have access to the objects that have been enabled for Feed Tracking they would be able to see the updates on their chatter feeds. This is tricky because if you are inactivating a contact and posting internal notes, these would be visible on the community sites.

Workaround?

You can only enable chatter for these objects and uncheck all the fields from the field tracking. Go to Setup-> Feed Tracking->  enable feed tracking for the object and un check all the fields.

In such exceptional cases there is another way you can do field tracking. Enable Chatter for objects you want to track the field level changes. Of course you will have to train users to post comments while making changes on any record in the chatter post. This way you can track the changes made on any records. Chatter provides you with two options for a post

1)      Internal Users only

a.      Chatter Post for all Internal Users

2)      All with Access

a.      Chatter Post for all users including community members who have access to this record or who are currently following this record.

Conclusion: Chatter Feed is a great feature to track and post field level changes on the records.Depending on the sharing rules and field level security users can see changes in the chatter feed.