OrgView Help & Reference

OrgView Overview

OrgView is a graphical compass to navigate through your account, contact, and user role hierarchies. OrgView covers three primary areas:

Automatically generate rich organization charts based on your existing account, contact, and user role information.

Build new charts from scratch with an intuitive drag and drop metaphor, or modify existing charts as conditions change.

Rapidly navigate through complex organizational structures with dynamic panning and zooming, graphical searches, and drill-down.

OrgView offers better communication in campaign planning through extremely responsive interaction with, and highly visual presentation of, key account, contact and user role information. OrgView can be implemented as a simple custom link in your salesforce.com account. There are no custom objects or tabs needed. OrgView is a completely free application for members of the salesforce.com community.

Recorded Tutorials

The links below take you to record-and-playback movies that cover many common questions about OrgView.

What are the different views available in OrgView?
How do I expand or collapse branches of the Org Chart?
How do I edit the fields that appear in the chart bubbles and tool tips?
How do I assign and re-parent accounts, contacts, or user roles?
How do I create new accounts, contacts, or user roles within OrgView?

OrgView Views

When you download OrgView from the AppExchange, you will receive three custom links: OrgView Account Chart, OrgView Contact Chart, and OrgView User Chart. These custom links should be added to the appropriate page layout for accounts, contacts or users. If you don't see the custom link for OrgView on your page layout, please contact your salesforce.com system administrator to fix this.

When you click on the link from an account or contact page layout, OrgView displays the hierarchy of contacts for that account. This is the family of linked contacts related to the given account, the illustration below shows this.

Use the three radio button at left to change the current view. For example, you can easily switch back and forth between the contacts in a given account and the account hierarchy, which is the familly of related accounts. This is often useful for accounts that have separate branches, subsidiaries, or parent companies. You can change the account that you are currently viewing by typing an account name into the text area at left and clicking the "account search" button. The "open account" button will open the salesforce.com editing interface for the current account. Here is a picture of a simple account hierarchy.

If you look at a page layout for a given user, you will see the OrgView User Chart custom link. This will display the given user in the current user role hierarchy for your company. The user role hierarchy can often only be edited by your system administrator. These are the roles that have been established for your salesforce.com account. Multiple users can be included under a given role. Use the radio buttons at left to switch views at any time. Here is an illustration of user roles in a typical account.

OrgView Entities

OrgView provides a highly graphical view of four salesforce.com standard entities: accounts, contacts, users, and user roles. This brief section discusses these entities in more detail.

Accounts have a "parent account" field that is used to establish a hierarchy. By tracing this linked list, OrgView can construct a graphical view of all the accounts related to the selected account.

Contacts are a related list to accounts. Most contacts for an ongoing sales campaign will fall under an account, and as new contacts are established they are often added to an account. Contacts have a "reports to" field that is used to establish a hierarchy of contacts in an organization. OrgView uses this field to display the related list of contacts for an account.

User roles are organized by your salesforce.com administrator. Any number of users can be assigned to a given role. Any time you click on a user name in a salesforce.com detail you will go to the page layout for that user. OrgView provides a quick way to see that user in the corporate hierarchy.

OrgView Activities

This section discusses various activities and special functions available with OrgView.

Zooming and Scaling

The sliders at upper left can be used to control the overall scale and width of the current view. This is useful for large charts that are hard to see all at once. You can also click the little "Jump To Full Screen" icon at upper left to take over the entire screen, which is another useful feature for viewing large complex charts.

List and Chart View

The little green icons at upper right allow you to toggle between list and chart view. The list view may be more useful for some purposes, and is similar to the salesforce interface for viewing account, contact, and user role hierarchy. The branches of the list can be expanded and collapsed with the box to the left of each list item. The chart view is the default mode, and provides a traditional organizational chart view of accounts, contacts, or user roles.

Expanding and Collapsing

The small circles at the bottom of the chart bubbles can be clicked to expand or collapse an entire branch of the chart tree. If a branch is already collapsed it is displayed as a dark circle. This is useful for hiding extraneous information about user roles, accounts, or contacts.

Dynamic Reparenting

You can quickly "drag and drop" to change the hierarchical relationship between accounts, contacts, and user roles. This is very useful for organizing your contacts in a given account, or making changes over time as your sales team gathers new information. Select the chart bubble to be moved and drag with the mouse to the new desired parent. A line with a black dot will track your mouse movements, and when you hover over an appropriate destination the dot will turn red. To disconnect a chart bubble drag the connector dot to the desktop and release. Sometimes some users will not have permission to reconnect some entities; an appropriate message will be displayed in this situation. Also, parent nodes can not be connected to their own children, you may need to disconnect some tree segments for large reorganizations that require this.

Creating New Accounts, Contacts, or User Roles

There are a variety of useful buttons across the top and bottom of the screen, the tool tips will provide more information as you hover the mouse over each button. The New button at top will create a new contact, account, or user role depending on the current view. The created entity will also be immediately visible in your salesforce.com interface. The Delete button will delete the selected entity. The Properties button will edit some of the properties for the selected entity.

Assign Existing Accounts, Contacts, or User Roles

The Assign button will move an existing contact into the current account, or move an existing account into the current account hierarchy. In other words, assigning a contact or account will bring an entity into the current hierarchy and remove it from the existing hierarchy.

When you assign a user to a user role, the user is moved from the current role into the new one. The user role assignment dialog can move multiple users between roles.

Editing Chart Contents and Tool Tips

OrgView enables the end user to customize the fields that appear in the chart bubbles and tool tips for accounts, contacts, users, and user roles. For accounts and contacts, just click the View button and the dialog below will appear. This allows easy selection of extra fields for the chart bubble or tool tip, click the red arrow to add a field to the list or the lower arrow to remove the field.

You can also add user role information to the chart bubbles and tool tips. When you click the Next button another dialog appears that allows selection of individual user information for that role. Since multiple users can be added to the chart bubble and tool tips, you are allowed to select the number of users to appear in the display with the sliders at bottom.