Starting November 20, the site will be set to read-only.
On December 4, 2023,
Apex Code Development (90768)
General Development (55146)
Visualforce Development (37251)
Lightning (18265)
APIs and Integration (17146)
Trailhead (11680)
Formulas & Validation Rules Discussion (11337)
Other Salesforce Applications (8116)
Jobs Board (6655)
Force.com Sites & Site.com (4842)
Mobile (2694)
You need to sign in to do that
Don't have an account?
Anurag Ranjan I have a complex business requirement where I am exploring to create a custom contact object rather than using standard contact object. What all OOTB SFDC feature(like lead conversion etc) will I lose if I go for custom contact object?
The list can be quite long but here is at a high level what I think you will lose if you choose to go with custom Contacts object:
1. Contact creation/updation upon Lead conversion - Since Contact will be custom, you would need to write a custom Lead conversion logic to ensure that Contacts get created/updated in this custom object upon Lead conversion
2. You will lose out on the Contact Roles feature that is available on Opportunities
3. Linking Activities to Contacts - Standard Contacts get associated to Tasks/Events via the Name (WhoID) field. So if you use Custom Contacts, you lose this capability
4. Email to Case - When Case gets created via emails, they automatically get linked to a Contact based upon the email id (Cases and Contacts are natively related to each other). So if you Contacts are custom, you will lose this as well
5. Customer Portal/Partner Portal users (VERY IMPT) - If you are using Customer/Partner portal, you will not be able to enable your Contacts as portal users as they will all be custom. In order to create Customer/Partner portal users, they have to setup as standard Contacts in the system
6. Reporting - A lot of standard reports are using standard Contacts. So you lose out on all of them and will have to re-create most of these standard reports
These are some of the key ones. You may also refer to the SFDC Data model - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/Content/data_model.htm to understand the relationship of Contacts with the other SFDC entities.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need further help.
All Answers
Hi,
First and the foremost you will loose "Assignment Rules". Apart from that LeadConversion , Web to Lead are exclusive only for Lead Object in the same ways Email to Case , Web to Case functionalities work only for Case Object. Considering opportunity object you will not be able to do Forecasting , You will not able to track history for few picklists which are in the Sales Process.
This list is endlesss as more the objects you consider , you will find more OOTB features over there. I would say just look for the functionality which you want to achieve over the custom object which is over standard one and then figure out whether that OOTB feature is available over custom object or not.
Apart from all these , you can create all of the above functionalities over custom object using Apex and Visualforce and Triggers. You will have the approvals , workflow available for custom Object.
Important :
Click on the Star Icon aside if this post provides you with useful information and if this is what you where looking for then please mark it as a solution for other benefits.
Thank You
The list can be quite long but here is at a high level what I think you will lose if you choose to go with custom Contacts object:
1. Contact creation/updation upon Lead conversion - Since Contact will be custom, you would need to write a custom Lead conversion logic to ensure that Contacts get created/updated in this custom object upon Lead conversion
2. You will lose out on the Contact Roles feature that is available on Opportunities
3. Linking Activities to Contacts - Standard Contacts get associated to Tasks/Events via the Name (WhoID) field. So if you use Custom Contacts, you lose this capability
4. Email to Case - When Case gets created via emails, they automatically get linked to a Contact based upon the email id (Cases and Contacts are natively related to each other). So if you Contacts are custom, you will lose this as well
5. Customer Portal/Partner Portal users (VERY IMPT) - If you are using Customer/Partner portal, you will not be able to enable your Contacts as portal users as they will all be custom. In order to create Customer/Partner portal users, they have to setup as standard Contacts in the system
6. Reporting - A lot of standard reports are using standard Contacts. So you lose out on all of them and will have to re-create most of these standard reports
These are some of the key ones. You may also refer to the SFDC Data model - http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/Content/data_model.htm to understand the relationship of Contacts with the other SFDC entities.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need further help.
Thanks cloudknight. That's what I was looking for.