Could your business use richer analytics? What about making use of the data you already have? Salesforce has done a fantastic job at helping Administrators get an idea of “who changed what,” especially in respect to data and configuration.
With the History object, most organizations have what they need to see what changes were made to a record, by whom, and when. In most cases it even shows what the value was before the change and after — this information can even been included in reports.
However, some organizations require further detail. This is usually in response to regulatory requirements to ensure that field audit history is specific enough and retained long enough to satisfy the regulations. To solve for this, Salesforce has provided Field Audit Trail.
Field Audit Trail helps provide forensic details of field changes in an org. It goes beyond the 18-month, out of the box storage for field history and takes it up to ten years! And, with a number of new tools, it extends the functionality of what you can do with this information, allowing you to automate logic based on certain conditions, and there’s even a pilot currently to help with anomaly detection.
Field History
Out of the box Salesforce can track up to 20 fields per object using field history and retains that information for 18 months. The benefit of this is displayed on the record in a related list and is even reportable.
Field Audit Trail uses a similar experience but extends those limits to track up to 60 fields and will retain as much as ten years.
Policy Configurator and Condition Builder
Using the Policy Configurator, administrators can now offer extended automation to help ensure compliance. Plus, with Condition Builder they can now act on these policies and enforce certain conditions, such as logging in with certain mobile device versions.
Delete Field History Permission
A new permission now allows specified individuals to delete historical information, if needed. It would require going through the API.
Use Case
Someone accidentally added credit card numbers to a name field. It logged the numbers in the history tracking. Then, they tried to fix it. Field History again logs that credit card number in the database. GDPR may require that the company wipe instances of that credit card number.
Real-Time Events Pilot
Starting in Spring 2018 a new pilot was made available to some Salesforce customers which provides new real-time events tracking and anomaly detection. New architecture is used to capture user behavior in Salesforce. You can now stream, store, and take action for each of these events. It supports the synchronous policy condition evaluation and actions for the real-time event and following event streaming and event storage use cases for customers with real-time security and performance monitoring use cases.
As you can see, Field Audit Trail is so much more than just history tracking. It’s now using this information to get richer analytics and use that data that’s already collected to help enforce behaviors in the system. Could you see the benefit of Field Audit Trail in your business?
