Salesforce has put a lot of energy into promoting Einstein Analytics in 2019. And for good reason, the predictive AI software is pretty powerful and integrated with Salesforce, it can give a big boost to your company. Einstein can be applied to many areas of CRM, from analyzing your pipeline to automating workflows. A less glamorous, but certainly valuable feature, is Einstein Activity Capture.

What is Einstein Activity Capture?

Einstein Activity Capture is a tool that lets you easily sync up your email, calendar, and Salesforce. It works in two ways, 1) capturing email and events from either your Microsoft or Google account, and then adds them to the activity timeline of any related records in Salesforce, thus saving you the step of manually entering activities into Salesforce. And 2) syncing events and contacts between Salesforce and your Microsoft or Google account.

These two features work hand in hand. Capture grabs the data and holds it for a brief period of time so you can see and use it, sync, when setup, then saves and stores the data in the system.

Sounds pretty great right? And it is, however, it isn’t as easy as snapping your fingers. Activity capture requires some setup and a bit of admin work to make sure it works the way you want it to.

Considerations for Activity Capture

There are a number of technical considerations and restrictions you need to be aware of before diving into Activity Capture. We highlight some of the key elements below, however, for a complete list, click here.

General

• By default, Einstein Activity Capture configurations capture emails and events. But you decide whether to sync contacts and events and in what direction.
• The capture functionality of Einstein Activity Capture is supported in sandbox environments but sync is not. After you set up Einstein Activity Capture in sandbox, any sandbox refresh turns off Einstein Activity Capture and removes all connected accounts from the sandbox.

Capture

• Custom objects aren’t supported. When emails are sent from a custom object, the email is logged on the activity timeline of the associated contact.
• Activities added to Salesforce with Einstein Activity Capture are stored outside of Salesforce and don’t affect your Salesforce data allocations. There’s no additional costs for this storage.
• The Last Activity field on accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and person accounts doesn’t reflect emails and events added to Salesforce with Einstein Activity Capture.

Sync

• Recurring events aren’t synced.
• You can sync contacts and events with Einstein Activity Capture or Lightning sync, but not both.
• If you turn off Einstein Activity Capture, we stop syncing events. If you turn on Einstein Activity Capture later, events that you created while Einstein Activity Capture was off don’t appear on Salesforce calendar. This condition is true even if the events occur in the future.

Analytics

• Because activities added to Salesforce with Einstein Activity Capture aren’t stored in Salesforce, they don’t show up in standard Salesforce reports. However, Einstein Activity Capture provides access to the Activities dashboard, which summarizes sales activities added to Salesforce manually and by Einstein Activity Capture.
• To access the Activities dashboard, API access is required. If you use Professional Edition, you must purchase API access. If you use Salesforce Essentials, you can’t access the Activities dashboard because API access isn’t available.

Click here to see the Activty Capture setup guide

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-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

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Mike Walsh

CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.