Considerations for Using Tasks

Task Reminders and Notifications in Lightning Experience

When a user is assigned a task, they get a notification. This notification appears in the notification bell in Lightning Experience and in the notification tray in the Salesforce mobile app. The Lightning Experience notification bell shows up to three notifications simultaneously.

When members of a group are assigned, each group member gets a notification.

Note If a guest user assigns a task to a regular user, the user receiving the task doesn't get a delegated task notification.

You can set activity reminders from your tasks and events in the Salesforce mobile app, and review your reminders from the notification tray in the app.

Task Creation for People and Groups in Lightning Experience

• You can assign a task to up to 200 people. When assigning a task to a group, the group can have up to 200 people in it. Each person gets their own task assignment.
• When editing a task, you can’t create more tasks by adding new users to the assigned to field.
• People who are listed individually and are in one or more groups get only one copy of the task.
• You can’t bulk create recurring tasks.
• To find the people who have been assigned a copy of the task, use the Delegated Tasks list view.
• Bulk creation of tasks for people and groups isn’t supported in Lightning Experience quick actions or the force:createRecord event. Overriding this behavior, such as with a Visualforce page, isn’t supported.
• Tasks are created only for the active members in public groups.
• Tasks created from quick actions can be assigned to users only.
• To clone tasks, create a custom clone button. Then, add the button to the page layout.

Task Assignment Notifications

Email notifications aren’t sent for tasks created using code via an Apex batch. Because Apex batches are asynchronous, the batch process doesn’t support the options required to set up notifications.

Task Queues in Lightning Experience

• Only Salesforce admins can set up task queues.
• You can see task items in a queue’s list view only if you’re a member of the queue. However, partner community users aren’t supported.
• Emails, notifications, and reminders are sent about task assignments only after the task is reassigned from a tasks queue to a specific user.
• To include task queues in packages, add the corresponding task list view and queue to your package.
• If the owner of a parent record is reassigned from a queue to a user, that record’s open tasks remain in the task queue.
• If you add the Assigned To field to your custom activities report, you can’t see tasks assigned to queues. To see tasks in queues, remove the Assigned To field.

Task Reports

• Reporting dashboards that have components based on both the Tasks and Events report type and another report type can’t be filtered by the Assigned field.
• You can’t add the Assigned To related look-up fields to the Activities Custom Report types from the Report Types setup. The user fields don’t display. To add User custom fields on the Assigned To field, add Assigned To as an object relationship on the Activities primary object in the custom report type. Standard and custom fields added to Assigned To are available to add to the report type, and are available on reports that use that report type.

Tasks and List Views

• Filters on activity views can’t be used on task views.
• Standard list view names, such as Today’s Task, that are renamed then reverted to their original name aren’t translated correctly.

Follow-Up Tasks

• The Create Follow-up Task action is in the set of predefined Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience actions on Task page layouts. If you’ve overridden the Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience Actions section on any Task page layouts, manually add the Create Follow-up Task action from the Salesforce1 & Lightning Actions palette.
• The Name and Related To fields must be in the task compact layout so that their contents can be copied to the follow-up task.
  

  Note Subject, Name, and Related To are in the system default compact layout for a task.

Guidelines for Recurring Tasks

• The record type is applied to each instance of a recurring task. It can be any record type that the task creator has access to.
• In Lightning Experience, the Due Date field for the series record is disabled in recurring tasks.

  In Salesforce Classic, the Due Date field for the series record says Recurs.

  Individual tasks in a series have different due dates.

• Changes to a series of recurring tasks override changes to single tasks that are due in the future. (Changes to a series don’t affect tasks due before the current date.) If you change the frequency or recurrence dates for a series, links to tasks due in the future break. Triggers and workflows are also reset.
• You can't change the status of a task series. You can only change the status of single tasks in a series.
• If you create a recurring task and you leave the reminder checkbox selected, you receive a reminder for each single task in the series.
• If you dismiss a reminder, you aren’t reminded about that task again.
• You can attach files to a series of recurring tasks. After you create a series, you can add or delete attachments to each single task in the series.
• Your Chatter feed doesn’t display recurring tasks, either in series or singly, and you can’t follow recurring tasks in Chatter.
• When you search tasks, only child tasks of a recurring series show up in the search results. Access the parent task from one of the series occurrences. This scenario is also true for searches within list views.
• When a child task’s owner is changed to someone other than the parent task’s owner, the child task is removed from the series. The RecurrenceActivityId is set to null.

Recurring Task Limits

There's a limit to how many recurring tasks you can create in a series, and the limit varies based on task frequency. The latest possible end date depends on the maximum number of tasks. For example, a recurring task that repeats every month supports up to 60 tasks in the series. In this case, the end date can be scheduled up to five years after the start date.

Tasks in the Salesforce Mobile App

• You can set activity reminders from your tasks and events in the Salesforce mobile app, and review your reminders from the notification tray in the app.
• The Salesforce mobile app doesn’t have an activity timeline, like records in Lightning Experience. Use the Activity History related list instead.
• The Subject field doesn’t include a picklist of previously defined subjects when Show simpler New Task form on mobile is enabled in Activity Settings.
• Existing shared activities (created in Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience) that use the Name field for contact associations can’t be edited in the Salesforce mobile app.
• Task list views created in Lightning Experience aren’t available on the Salesforce mobile app. Instead, manage tasks using these lists: My Tasks, Completed Within Last 7 Days, Delegated, and Today. Some task lists available in Salesforce Classic, such as This Month and All Open, aren’t available in the Salesforce mobile app.
• In task lists, the order of the fields in the priority picklist determines the order in which tasks are sorted.
• The more tasks that you have, and the more relationships that your tasks have to other records, the longer it can take to view tasks.
• When more than 1,000 overdue tasks exist, task lists in the Salesforce mobile app don’t display any overdue tasks at all. Use reports to view your overdue tasks and close them, postpone them, or delete their due dates.
• The Create Recurring Series of Tasks field isn’t supported on quick action layouts. Because only a portion of the recurring task interface appears in new task quick actions, users can’t save any new recurring tasks.
• The Create Recurring Series of Tasks field isn’t supported on quick action layouts. Because only a portion of the recurring task interface appears in new task quick actions, users can’t save any new recurring tasks.
• You can’t create recurring tasks with a frequency of every weekday. We don’t recommend editing tasks with this frequency because the edit page doesn’t show the task’s recurrence settings. To create or edit tasks that repeat every weekday, use Salesforce Classic.
• If a task doesn’t include a subject, it appears in feeds as [No Subject].
• The All Activity History tab isn’t available.
• Reps can’t create a task with a reminder unless you turn off the Show simpler New Task form on mobile setting. From Setup, enter Activity Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Activity Settings. Deselect Show simpler New Task form on mobile.
• Task layouts contain a few unique elements that make tasks easier to work with. These elements don’t appear in a compact layout because you can’t change them, but users always see them:
  • The checkbox icon represents the status of the IsClosed field to users with the Edit Task permission.
  • The red flag icon represents a task marked high priority (including custom high priority).
  • If the due date exists and a user has permission to view it, all tasks show the due date.
  • Tasks include the primary contact and the related account or other record, when they exist.

  The fields in each list can vary depending on the settings in your Salesforce org.

  You control the layout of task records and tasks in the task list using compact layouts. You can control related lists, as always, using the page layout editor. Adding the due date field to either layout doesn’t change the appearance of tasks and that field never appears twice.

  Below the built-in task elements, the Salesforce mobile app displays up to three other fields.

  • The default compact layout for tasks includes two fields: the name of a lead or contact, and an opportunity, account, or other record the task is related to.
  • In an Activities related list, a task’s fields depend on what record you’re viewing and how you’ve defined the layout for that object.

  For more information, see Compact Layouts.