Salesforce Mass Actions Made Easy [In-Depth Overview]

Empower your Salesforce users to easily perform mass operations on Salesforce data in no time, with the possibility for admins to extend the functionality with ‘clicks, not code’.

Highlights

• Mass operation capabilities – updates, inserts, and ownership changes – even on Large Data Volumes (LDV).
• Salesforce-native, user-friendly interface.
• Granular control over volumes and permissions for user actions.
• Ensure compliance with the use of Audit Logs.

With Salesforce users actioning a high number of records, especially around the busier periods (e.g. quarter end), allowing them to edit multiple records at a time – in a controlled manner – becomes a lifesaver.

Since out of the box options are limited, achieving this requires custom development with declarative tools such as Flow or APEX. Alternatively, there’s always the option to search for a third-party AppExchange solution, which could lead to a surprising return on investment.

Plauti collates some of the most well-known user activities (often completed manually in Salesforce or achieved through imports) under the same umbrella with their Data Action Platform. From changing record ownership to creating Tasks in bulk, there is surely at least one component of this standalone product that will help save time and alleviate work burdens for you and your team!

This in-depth overview will showcase the main features Plauti’s Data Action Platform has to offer, ideal use cases, and setup effort, as well as how fast your users will adopt this new tool.

Features

The Lightning App (included alongside the other components in the Data Action Platform managed package) is the place where all the magic happens. From here, you can control access, bulk update data, or monitor the changes that have already happened.

Action Library

Sitting at the center of Data Action Platform functionality, the Action Library page contains all possible out of the box actions that Plauti has developed for you to instantly make use of. For a tailored user experience, you can even change the name of the action to whatever works best for your user base.

Plauti is constantly working on increasing the number of actions in their library, on top of the seven actions available in the package right now. These are:

• Assign Ownership (all Objects)
• Create Tasks (All Objects)
• Find & Replace (All Objects)
• Mass Convert (available for Leads only)
• Mass Delete (all Objects)
• Mass Update (all Objects)
• Set Account Hierarchy (available for Accounts only)
• Run a Flow (all objects)
• Find & Replace (all objects) 
• Custom Actions (based on custom Apex, all objects)

This is where the ever-important access to these actions can be controlled from – click the Assignment button next to the action you’d like to edit.

At present, permissions to use certain types of actions or limit the number of records processed (at a time) can be defined for each Salesforce profile or individual Users. Having this ability is crucial for catering to users based on their job needs, while also ensuring that errors are kept to a minimum.

Keep in mind that through these Assignment capabilities, Plauti is aiming towards enabling your organization to create Salesforce power users, in order to alleviate the Admin’s burden while still having full control over the result of the Actions. You will also find out as we explore Plauti’s functionalities in detail below, that an Admin can leverage Plauti’s platform to assign not only the out of the box Actions, but also macros and/or Custom Actions to user groups of their choice.

List View Actions

Available out of the box for Leads, Contacts, and Accounts, the possibility of leveraging readily available actions for either Standard or Custom Objects can make a huge difference. This can be achieved in a few easy steps. Give it a go yourself by following the tutorial below…

Now that the button is available on the Lead List View, it’s time to try out a couple of the Actions. Keep in mind that the changes are executed synchronously in real time – hence why the duration of the operation will increase alongside the number of records selected. You will be able to follow progress on screen.

Mass Convert

Converting Leads is an activity that Sales and Business Development users are likely to be very accustomed to. While it may not be the case for all the Leads, there are situations when it isn’t necessary to go through each Lead manually to relate them to the same Account and Opportunity. This is where the Mass Convert action comes into play!

As you can see, Plauti has ensured that the action is very easy to use, and the sole ability to process multiple records at the same time is sure to become a user favorite!

Note: To convert multiple Leads to the same Account, make sure that the Account exists first. If the option to create a new Account is selected, the action will create an Account for each of the converted Leads.

Assign Ownership

Record ownership is certainly a big deal in Salesforce, as it comes with both the responsibility to work on said record(s), as well as extra privileges when it comes to permissions. While the record assignment can be done in a few different ways, varying from Data Loader to manually changing the owner, this Data Action Platform activity is sure to be a better choice from both an ‘experience’ and a ‘functionality’ perspective.

Selected records can be assigned to a single user, to a Queue (if supported), or to a Group. The below example showcases what this action can do when it comes to the users that are members of a Group. Not only can the assignment method be chosen for the number of records to be evenly distributed between them, but you can also customize the percentage for each person to better suit the situation. A great real-life example of this Action in use is the successful even redistribution of records from one or more inactive users to active users.

Extend the Action Launcher to Any Other Object

While we only demonstrated the Action Launcher on Leads, don’t forget that most of them apply for Accounts and Contacts as well, with the exception of Mass Convert (Lead Specific) and Set Account Hierarchy (Account Specific).

On top of this, you can pick and choose to leverage the Action Launcher for any other Standard or Custom Salesforce Object of your choice. You will have to create a Visualforce page and a Custom button on the said object, then add it to the list of available List View buttons. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to achieve this here.

Macros

Macros within the Data Action Platforms are predefined actions which can be used recurrently to maximize the available out of the box Actions provided in the Action Library (where Macros can be created from and will appear in the list).

In this simple example, I chose to create a Macro that will generate Follow-up Tasks for the Opportunity Owner to complete. This way, for those running the automation, it will be extremely easy to include the Macro in the Job after filtering the desired records – all without having to set up the Create Tasks action and define the field values.

Run Actions in a Batch Job

The DAP Job tab is where jobs can be created or inspected after they run. These represent a very straightforward and scalable way to apply one of the available standard or custom actions to a subset of records, especially when talking about a large volume of data, as the execution is asynchronous.

Not only can either Standard or Custom objects be included in these jobs, but you and your users will also have the ability to filter exactly as you would in a Salesforce report, including the capacity to refer to fields from associated records and use filter logic.

Following the job execution, you will have the ability to inspect what happened in detail by clicking on the Info button, or deleting the record if it’s no longer needed.

Scheduled Jobs

As of the last Data Action Platform release, it was possible for jobs to run on a standard or custom object. These could also be scheduled using one of the available frequencies – handy for repetitive tasks, as it removes the need for someone to go in manually and run the job.

Run actions from Apex or Salesforce Flow 

Any action from the Action Library can also be started from an Apex Class or from Salesforce Flows. This allows you to extend your own custom business processes with the next-level capabilities of Data Action Platform actions, without having to write any code. For example, use “Find & Replace” in combination with regular expressions in a Salesforce Flow to do advanced standardization, and as a follow-up action,  evenly divide a group of records to your Sales team. 

Audit Log

Audit Logs can be enabled to ensure governance over the changes happening through the Data Action Platform functionality.

This tracking ability is vital when users are making multiple data changes, especially to fields which are, for example, not history tracked. Easily identify who and what was changed, right from the DAP Setup tab by navigating to one of the two available Audit Logs.

Action Audit

The first Audit option provides insight into each action that was triggered through any of the mechanisms available within the Data Action Platform. Once activated, be it a Job or a List View Action, you can find all of the details you need here.

Not only are you able to see which user triggered the action, but you can also find out the details of what happened by clicking on the Info button.

Record Audit

The Record Audit option is the game changer that Plauti’s Data Action Platform brings to the table. Of course, it’s great to see the Record ID that was impacted, the user involved, and which Action or Job was used, but now you can also see exactly what was changed!

From the overview screen above, click on the Info button to see the change that occurred displayed in the summary section – in this case, the Website field on the Account Object. And the reason this is so important? In my developer edition, Field History Tracking was not enabled at all.

This means that if you did not purchase anything extra (other than the 20 out of the box fields available for history tracking), you will still be able to see when any of the fields were changed, as long as one of the Data Platform Action’s features is used.

Keep in mind that this feature is also considerate of the storage space the logs can end up occupying – you can always clean up the logs that are no longer needed using the Delete Logs button. You can, of course, delete everything if desired, or drill down into a specific subset of the logs while keeping the others in place.

Roadmap

The team behind the Data Action Platform is not only focusing on ensuring a great customer experience with the features that are already available, but they are also continuously developing new features to enhance this powerful tool. We’ll dive into a couple of the new additions which are ‘coming soon’ to the Data Action Platform.

Undo

As simple as it may sound, the ability to undo record changes triggered by users through either an action or a job could be the ultimate time saver you’ve been waiting for. The Undo action will become available within the Audit Logs, and it can be utilized as many times as required. You will be able to undo an entire action spanning across multiple records from the Action Audit Log, or undo individual record changes from the Record Audit Log.

Run Flows

With Salesforce Admins’ attention concentrated on Flow as the go-to declarative automation tool, it was always a matter of time until the option to run a flow would become available on the Data Action Platform.

Soon, Admins will be able to either leverage the action themselves or empower users to run a certain flow directly from the List View Action Launcher or through a DAP Job. Combined with the Macros already available, new actions can be easily created and started for multiple records with a single click.

On top of these two features, Plauti is also planning to enhance the Data Action Platform through integrations with other products from their suite: Duplicate Check and Record Validation. This way, actions will become available to trigger on records resulting from a duplicate job or processed within Record Validation.

Use Cases

We could explore as many use cases as there are objects or processes in your Salesforce organization. We will, however, dive into a couple of the out of the box options, which can empower both your more technical team members and your other users instantly.

When it comes to Salesforce data, one of the most tricky discussions is definitely about deleting records. The Data Action Platform provides the Mass Delete Action for list views out of the box, but of course, it is up to the administrator as to how the permissions for this should be controlled.

While this is a great use case when enabling data, for stewards or admins to easily clean up the database (either through the list view or through a scheduled job for example), I’d recommend ensuring this doesn’t end up in the ‘wrong hands’ – users could mistakenly delete important data and skip the Recycle Bin.

On top of this, considering the need for organizations to comply with the GDPR privacy regulations, this action can come in handy to automatically delete a specific subset of data at a time and frequency of your choice.

A newly available action in Plauti’s latest release for the Data Action Platform is Find & Replace. It is not only extremely easy to use, but also very handy when it comes to correcting data – from a few records at once (from the List View), to a few thousand or even hundreds of thousands (to a Job).

In the example below, I was looking forward to correcting all Contact records that have been mistakenly imported with a wrong Department value. In this case, I chose once again to use Field Variables to take the Department string from two levels up in the Contact hierarchy created through the Reports To field.

For this scenario, it makes sense to replace the entire string, but a partial replacement can also be achieved.

Impact

It goes without saying that Plauti’s Data Action Platform is one of those very intuitive tools which can bring value to your user base right from the start! The simple, yet powerful, actions available are sure to help users enjoy working with Salesforce records even more, while also allowing admins to benefit from automations otherwise only available through custom development.

Setup

My experience of setting up the Data Action Platform was very fast. As with a lot of AppExchange products, it comes as a managed package with just a few components to be installed in your Salesforce org. It can, of course, be installed in either a sandbox or production environment, allowing you to properly test the functionality wherever you would like.

Additionally, it comes with the Data Action Platform permission set, which should be assigned to users who are going to be using any of the tools. Apart from this, it’s up to you how the available actions are configured for each Profile (as explained above in the Action Library section).

Support

Plauti’s Help Center is the place to go when questions arise about any of their products. You can search by keywords or peruse the existing articles, depending on whether you have a specific question or simply want to know more.

If the information is not sufficient to answer your inquiry, you can reach out to the Plauti team by sending them a message via the form or the chat options (available for pre-sales only). Of course, there is always the email option – you can get in touch with Plauti at [email protected].

Documentation

Plauti offers comprehensive documentation covering all the available features and has removed the need to navigate to different places to find answers.

While documentation and all release notes are external links, the Getting Started button opens a pop-up within Salesforce, briefly describing the basics of what the platform’s setup can offer.

Pricing

The pricing structure for the Data Action Platform is very simple and tailored to benefit all customers, regardless of their budget. As you can see below, there is even a free tier that allows organizations to use some of the key actions for as long as needed, with no constraints on the number of users enabled prior to committing to a purchase. Isn’t that nice?

Summary

Finally, the Data Action Platform is a product that is bound to make Salesforce tasks a breeze, for administrators and end users alike. With the possibility of running record changes both synchronously and asynchronously, Plauti ensures scalability even for enterprise-level organizations with a large number of records.

By simply installing DAP you automatically enter a free trial of the Premium edition for 10 days (after which the package will simply be reverted to the free edition you can still use), no credit card needed. Feel free to access the package directly from the AppExchange listing to find out how powerful and easy to use the Data Action Platform really is.