I've recently started at a company where the sales department relies pretty heavily on Salesforce. There is a strange balance of forces here where the staff really seems to hate Salesforce, and any little excuse of Salesforce 'not working' perfectly seems to lead to them not using it. That makes management angry, which makes the department throw IT under the bus, which means every little Salesforce hiccup is now my problem.
There are 3 problems I have identified, one I MAY have tackled and one seems to only happen to one person, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has run into these, or really about anyone's experience with the Salesforce for Outlook plugin in general as it may give me ideas.
Its also hard to get decent feedback from the staff, because due to their hatred of Salesforce they seem to love the fact that it doesn't work. They overstate issues to management and understate them to me. Details on those issues follow the same pattern.
Couple of things to note:
- Everyone who uses Salesforce is using Outlook 2013, With a mix of Win10 Pro and Win7 Pro, all 64bit.
- I'd only recently discovered folks were not keeping Salesforce up-to-date. Working on correcting that but being on the latest version doesn't seem to help.
- We are using Kaspersky Security Center 10. We are giving Salesforce an application scan exclusion for
*\AppData\local\programs\salesforce.com\but I don't thing there are any Salesforce specific firewall exclusions. In addition to Kaspersky running antivirus and firewalling on the PCs we have a Sonicwall.
The Issues:
Salesforce for Outlook drops connectivity without much feedback. Requires a restart of the Salesforce Plugin. This happens relatively often and seems to require a restart of Outlook and/or the Salesforce plugin.
The Salesforce for Outlook Plugin is randomly disabled by Outlook. I think I've fixed this one, I set a GPO to enforce the following three registry keys:
SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList\SalesforceForOutlook=1,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList\Salesforce for Outlook Side Panel=1, andSOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList\AddinSidePanel.AddinModule=1this seems to have helped this problem, but, again, getting feedback is very tough and for the most part users see it as all one problem. "My salesforce stopped working" its two different problems, but users will basically use that same feedback for either of the two issues.This last one is the problem that seems to be only effecting one user, but that is also hard to tell as not all the users use their speakers all the time. Salesforce occasionally causes Outlook to generate extra mouse clicks. If you stop the Salesforce for Outlook Plugin the clicks go away. If you start the Salesforce for Outlook plugin again without restarting Outlook, the clicks return. You have to restart Outlook to make this go away. They are REAL mouse-clicks, if you have a dialogue box open in Outlook and get it to generate the clicks it will produce the other click sound. This clicking only happens in 'main' outlook windows. Say, the user has their Mail window open, and opens Calendar in a new window, and you click back and forth between these two windows, it will produce 1-3 additional clicks every time. This cannot be repeated in other outlook windows (mail opened in independent windows, or new mail). You do not get this phenomena from clicking in other applications, or the desktop, or ANYWHERE else. While this is the least problematic issue it fascinates me the most. Also the one person I know its effecting happens to be the president of the company, so there's that :)
ANY help or advice would be greatly appreciated!! The Salesforce support folks seem to want to blame everything else - mostly Kaspersky - but we can disable Kaspersky and get roughly the same results.
