A Simple Example
Tracking Out of Office Requests / Vacation Requests in salesforce.com
See below to test drive this functionality.
Background: Most organizations use a paper or email based process for vacation requests. The downside to these mediums is that security is low, data retention/organization is poor, approvals are manual/paper based, and routing of the request is not ensured. Neither is tracability. This simple application resolves all those issues.
So how would you go about capturing this data? In an ideal world, you would create a form/template, that users could fill out and save. And then, ideally, you could notify their supervisor that the request has been made. And ideally, these records would be private to only the requestor and their supervisor and above. Sounds simple. If you are coming from a Visual Basic world, the functionality above would required days of programming time to get working. In salesforce.com, using the Native framework, it takes about 30 minutes
Application description: Using a combination of a 1 new custom object with custom fields to track the details of the request:
- Reason for request
- Type of Request (sick leave, paid time off, etc.)
- Date requested
- Departure Date
- Return Date
- etc.
...and some workflow and approval rules to ensure the right supervisors are given the opportunity to approve or deny the request, organizations can automate their vacation tracking and out of office requests using salesforce.com.
In addition to the automation of requests and approvals, salesforce.com reporting functionality is automatically available for this data. Imagine a dashboard that lets HR stay on top of request, PTO, etc...
That's it, there's not much to it. The best way to learn how this is done it to explore the custom objects in the Setup menu of the Test Drive area for this application on the AppExchange Directory.
Test Drive and Explore it here on the AppExchange Directory