Thursday, January 14, 2010

Sending Scheduled Reports to Individual Users in a Restricted Report Folder

Scheduled Reports is a powerful feature of Salesforce.com.  It allows you to schedule a specific report to run – and have the results emailed in HTML format – to a specific user or group of users.  You can configure a report to run each morning at 7:00 AM, and have that report automatically emailed to all your direct reports.  Very handy!



One of my users with delegated “report admin” privileges uses this to great advantage, but ran into a problem:


“I have a Salesforce.com Report Folder which is restricted to a certain users: it is only visible to Manager and Director Roles. One of the managers has requested a copy of a specific report from this folder be emailed to him at the start of each business day. Scheduled Reports supports this functionality, but not if the report is in a restricted access folder. When you set the folder access so that only certain roles can access it, Salesforce.com does not allow you to select “Users” when setting up the “Send Email To” option. The Report Builder option only allows Public Groups, Roles, and Users. What should I do? I don’t want to create a “Public Group” with just one person in it, and I don’t want to make this entire folder public – help!”

Here’s the workaround I gave her:

1.) After hours, when no one is likely to be accessing the system, change the restricted access report folder to public.


2.) Use the “Schedule Future Runs” feature to schedule the report. Because the report folder is now “public”, you can select a filter option that allows you to send it to a specific user. Save the scheduled report settings.


3.) Go back to the Report Folder access settings, and change the access privs back to the original restricted access.




Viola - the scheduled report will still be sent to the users within the selected mail-to list, and your report folder is still private.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the trick! Here's a follow-up question...how do you keep track of what reports a specific user receives? For example, let's say that user leaves your organization and a replacement has been hired, how you keep track of where you need to remove one name and add another?

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  2. You can use the "All Scheduled Jobs" page to see what scheduled reports and dashboards are currently configured for your org (Setup > Monitoring > Scheduled Jobs). From here, you may need to select individual jobs and look at their parameters. That job might be easier if you adopt a standard naming convention for scheduled reports which helps you identify who the report is sent to.

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  3. Hi JP,
    Do you know if a scheduled daily report will go out “even” if there are no records?
    For ex: we plan on sending out a scheduled daily report for leads from a lead queue..and wondering if the report will go out even if there are no leads in the queue?
    Thanks for any feedback
    sfdc newbie

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  4. Excellent JP, thanks for finding the work around. Still a bit ridiculous that something so seemingly simple requires a convoluted process, wish SF would fix things like this.

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