What's the Real Risk with Enabling Divisions?

In Salesforce, divisions are a means to improve query and search performance by partitioning data into logical buckets called "divisions". However, like with the Person Accounts feature, many admins may hesitate and think twice about enabling divisions due to this warning: "Enabling divisions is irreversible. After implementing divisions, you cannot revert back to a state that does not have division fields."

"Irreversible", huh? Well... what's the real risk with enabling divisions? I think there is no significant risk.

According to Salesforce Help (Summer '15), enabling divisions may affect (or not) nine key areas. But it seems like the effects can be easily negated or suppressed.

Area	Reversal Strategy
Search	Revoke the "Affected by Divisions" permission.
List views	Revoke the "Affected by Divisions" permission.
Chatter	Not supported (i.e., affected).
Reports	Revoke the "Affected by Divisions" permission.
Viewing records and related lists	Not affected.
Creating new records	Set to the global division.
Editing records	Set to the global division.
Custom objects	Set to the global division.
Relationships	Set to the global division.

In short, if you want to give divisions a try, talk to a few people about enabling the feature. If the foremost argument against enabling divisions is simply that it's irreversible, go ahead and just enable it anyway (in a full sandbox first). If it doesn't work for you, you can always revoke the Affected by Divisions permission from all users.

Last Event or Task Date vs. Last Activity Date

Salesforce gives users the ability to run reports on the Last Activity Date for all objects, out of the box. But what if users wanted to distinguish between Last Event Date vs. Last Task Date? Or break up the data by other criteria?

Luckily, the Declarative Rollups for Lookups package (thanks to Andy Fawcett) can solve this problem, with only a few minor tweaks to work around a Salesforce limitation: field ActivityDate does not support aggregate operator MAX.

The general idea is to create two custom fields on the object of your choice: Last Event Date and Last Task Date. Follow these up with two Lookup Rollup Summaries, and you can now easily split your activity data by Tasks vs. Events. The end result? Reports like the following.

Follow this tutorial and give these new fields a try! Please add a comment below to let me know whether this tip works for you.

Report Folder: Embedded Analytics

I thought it'd be worthwhile to jot a few notes about consistency in managing Salesforce reports designed for embedded analytics. Specifically, help admins quickly identify and find these reports, so that accidental edits can be avoided in organizations with hundreds or thousands of reports.

The idea is pretty simple:

• Put all reports used for embedded analytics in a folder called Embedded Analytics
• Begin all report names with the object label and a colon (':'), so that the target object is immediately understood. For example: "Contact: Activities Last 30 Days"
• Begin all report descriptions with, "Embedded chart showing ..."