Available in: Group, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Contact Manager, Database.com, and Developer Editions
The Chatter publisher is the tool at the top of each feed that lets users post comments and polls and share files and links. With publisher actions, we’ve made the publisher more useful and more flexible. The publisher actions feature lets you create actions and add them to the Chatter publisher on the home page, the Chatter tab, and record detail pages. It also allows you to customize the order in which the standard Chatter actions appear, including Post, File, Link, and Poll.
Actions Overview
Actions let users do more in Chatter, like create records directly in the feed. There are two general types of actions: create actions and custom actions.
• Create actions let users create records. They’re different from the New button on object tabs and the Quick Create and Create New features on the home page. Create actions respect your validation rules and field requiredness, and you can choose each action’s fields.
• Custom actions are Visualforce pages with functionality you define. For example, you might create a custom action to let users write comments longer than 1000 characters.
Note: For both types of actions, you can create either object-specific actions or global actions.
Enabling Publisher Actions
1. From Setup, click Customize > Chatter > Settings.
2. Click Edit.
3. Select Enable Publisher Actions.
4. Click Save.
New Feed Tracking Option with Publisher Actions
When you enable publisher actions, a new option, All Related Objects, appears on the feed tracking page for account, campaign, case, contact, custom objects, lead, and opportunity. This option lets users view feed activity for objects that have a parent-child or lookup relationship to the host object.
1. From Setup, click Customize > Chatter > Feed Tracking > All Related Objects.
1. From Setup, click Customize > Lead > Buttons, Links, and Actions
2. From Setup, click Customize > Lead > Page Layouts
Global Action (Create Actions)
1. From Setup, click Create > Global Actions
2. From Setup, click Customize > Chatter > Publisher Layouts
3. From Setup, click Customize > Account > Buttons, Links, and Actions
Object-Specific Custom Actions
Object-specific custom actions let users interact with or create records that have a relationship to an object record. The Visualforce page for an object-specific custom action must include the standard controller for the relevant object. For example, if you want to create a custom action that lets users import a contact’s Twitter profile and add that information to a contact record, you need to use the standard contact controller.
1. From Setup, click Customize > Lead > Buttons, Links, and Actions
2. From Setup, click Customize > Lead > Page Layouts
Create a global custom action for tasks that don’t require users to interact with or create records that have a relationship to a specific object. Visualforce pages you want to use as global custom actions can’t use standard controllers. For example, if you want to create a custom action that lets users enter a street address and see a map, the local time, and the local weather, create a Visualforce page that doesn’t use any of the standard controllers, and add it as a custom global action.
1. From Setup, click Create > Global Actions
2. From Setup, click Customize > Chatter > Publisher Layouts
3. From Setup, click Customize > Lead > Buttons, Links, and Actions
Supported Objects
You can create object-specific actions on these objects:
• Account
• Campaign
• Case
• Contact
• Custom objects
• Lead
• Opportunity
• User
You can create actions that let users create these kinds of records:
• Account
• Asset
• Campaign
• Case
• Contact
• Contract
• Custom objects
• Entitlement
• Event (without invitees)
• Lead
• Opportunity
• Service Contract
• Task
Note: When you create an object-specific action, you can choose as a target object only event, task, or any object that has a parent-child or lookup relationship to the host object.
