Tracking The Activities of Users with Field History and Chatter

With any enterprise/business application, having an audit and change trail is crucial.  With that audit/change trail you can track who made changes and when.  With SalesForce there are a number of different ways you can do this.  They include:

• Setup Audit Trail
• Field History
• Chatter Feed Tracking

So, let's review what each of these are.

Setup Audit Trail

The Setup Audit Trail, which is available only to administrators, is found under Setup.  The Setup Audit Trail gives you details about changes made in the Setup module, including changing fields, adding users and more.  This is enabled by default and can't be turned off.

Sample Audit Trail

Field History

The Field History can be enabled by administrators on any object.  They let the administrator set up to 20 fields to be tracked automatically.  Once selected, any changes made to those fields by users will be denoted in the Field History related list on the object.  The fields to be tracked are under the fields section of the respective object by clicking on Field History.

Sample Field History on an Account

Chatter Feed

The Chatter Feed Tracking can be enabled by administrators on any object.  They let the administrator set up to 20 fields to be tracked and when changes are made, a chatter post is created.  This is useful for field changes like Account, Lead, Contact Names or Status Changes like Opportunity Status, Lead Status, etc.   It is important to note that unlike the other two options above, a user could delete the Chatter Post and remove the "history"

Sample of the Chatter Feed Tracking

Conclusion

Overall there are a number of ways that you can track the history of activities in SalesForce.  These are in addition to things like the Login History and Created/Last Modified details tracked on a record.