Communicate with your Salesforce Users like they were Contacts

Ever want to email a coworker about an Account or Project you're working on, but, you'd like to use salesforce to track all that communication and activity? Maybe you're collaborating on a customer, and you need all your emails between you and your coworker to show up on that customer's Contact record. Since that coworker is a salesforce User, you'd think salesforce would let you do that. But, on the User record page, there's no related list for Activities. That means, you can't just email your coworker (User) and then use the Outlook toolbar to "Add to Salesforce" like you would if you were emailing a Contact in salesforce.



Here's what I have done. The simple work around is to create all your Users as Contacts under your company's Account. That way, your company is listed as an Account, with all of its Users listed as Contacts.

To accomplish this, you might export your Users list, then import them as Contacts, or, if many of your coworkers are already in your Outlook Contact list, you could just take each one of them and "mark them for sync" using the Outlook toolbar. Once you sync, all of them will show up in salesforce as Contacts. Just be sure your Outlook Contacts for each of them has the exact same company name so you don't inadvertently create duplicate Accounts for your company.

Also, see the post on putting the vCard custom link onto your Users record page so you can then download them into your Outlook Contacts, and mark them for sync.

One further thing you should do is to make sure all the Users in your organization have access to this Account, after all, they'll want to communicate with the Users in your company as well. One easy way to do this is to add a Sharing Rule to allow this one Account to be viewed by a Group made up of your entire role heirarchy.