Activity Capture

1) About

This guide will walk you through all the steps to set up and configure activity capture from your email and calendar solution to Salesforce. If you have questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact our support team at support@getweflow.com.

2) General Information

Who needs to be involved?

If you are not the admin for Salesforce and Google/Microsoft, then make sure to include the following people:

A Google / Microsoft admin with privileges to install a new app in the workspace.
A Salesforce admin who can install a new managed package for all users.
A Salesforce admin who can create an integration user and assign permissions sets (only needed if you want to use an integration user).

What can we prepare to make things go as fast as possible?

For Google Workspace, the package can be installed independently from signing up to Weflow (you can find it here).
For Microsoft, the admin needs to sign in to Weflow and install the package from there.
For the managed package, the Salesforce admin needs to sign in to Weflow and install it from there.

How long does it take?

You can setup the entire solution within 30 minutes. It often takes less than that. You can either do it by yourself with this guide, or partner with our Success Team to walk you through it.

Using Einstein with Weflow

If you use Einstein Activity Capture in parallel with Weflow, please disable the bi-directional sync for events and only keep Workspace -> Salesforce enabled. Otherwise, this setting will break the integration and cause data hygiene issues.

Integration User VS User-by-User

You have two options to configure and set up activity capture with Weflow:

1.) User-by-User

In this case, the API calls are handled via the authentication token of each individual user.
Users get invited to Weflow and need to connect to Weflow with their Salesforce SSO.
This integration is fast to get up and running and suitable for teams of up to 25 users and/or running a trial with Weflow.
You can start with this approach and then switch to an integration user later when you want to scale the rollout.

2.) Integration User

In this case, the API calls are handled via the integration user.
No user needs to connect to Weflow (though they still can, e.g., to use our Chrome Extension).
You have complete control, and onboarding large amounts of users is easier.
On the flipside, this setup is slightly more complicated i.e., creating an integration user, assigning permission sets, and making sure everything is well configured in Salesforce.

3) Setup

A) User-by-User

Step 1: Starting the setup

Go to the Admin Console
Select ‘Activity Capture’
Click on the big blue button that says ‘Set up Activity Capture’.

Step 2: Selecting your workspace

Select ‘Google G Suite’ if you use Google Workspace (Gmail and Google Calendar) to send and receive emails and meetings.
Select ‘Microsoft’ if you use Microsoft 365 or Outlook to send and receive emails and meetings.

Step 3: Selecting the authentication flow

Google - Select ‘Google Workspace Marketplace App’.

Microsoft - Select ‘OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials Flow’.

Step 4: Getting ready to install the app

Next up, you need to install the central application in your workspace.
This application will allow us to compare your Microsoft/Google user directory with your users on Salesforce.

Important: The email addresses in both systems must match (upper/lower case can be ignored). If they do not match, please adjust them in Salesforce to match the directory in Google/Microsoft.

Google - Click on the ‘Install App’ button:

Microsoft - Click on the ‘Next’ button:

Step 5: Installing the app to your workspace

Google:

You are forwarded to the Google Admin console.
Sign in with your admin credentials or share the link with an admin.
On the new page, click on the ‘Install App’ button.

In the next step, you will be asked to give Weflow the necessary permissions.
We suggest installing the app for all users to ensure simple user management (especially if Google Workspace and Salesforce are managed by separate teams.
Alternatively, you can create an organisational unit in which users need to be added/removed before activity capture can be enabled for them.
Once the app has been installed, go back to Weflow and click the ‘Next’ button.

Microsoft:

Click on ‘Accept’.

The app is now installed for the entire workspace.

Step 6: Sync settings

The following steps are the same whether you use Google or Microsoft.
Email and Calendar logging will be activated by default.
If you don’t want to have one of them active, click the blue toggle to deactivate it.
In addition, you can exclude specific attachments from being logged to Weflow or deactivate attachment logging altogether.
Moreover, Weflow lets you choose to log either to tasks or to the email message object. Logging to the email message object has many benefits. To learn more about the pros and cons, scroll down to section 6.
Finally, you can decide whether Weflow should create new contacts on the first log. To learn more about the logic and rules behind this setting, scroll down to sections 6 - B in this document.

To consider when logging attachments:

Weflow recommends excluding logging attachments below 30kb, as this will exclude company logos commonly found in email signatures.
If you want to exclude attachments bigger than, e.g. 5MB, enter the value ‘5000’ into the field next to ‘Exclude attachments larger than (size in kB)’.
You can always go back and change these settings later.

Step 7: Activating users

Once you click the ‘Next’ button, you’ll see a list of users who match those who have currently signed up to Weflow and can be found in both Salesforce and your Google/Microsoft workspace.
To add more users to Weflow, check out this help desk article here.
You can always add/remove users from this list later.

Step 8: Internal and external domain exclusion

Depending on your type of business, you’d want to exclude specific external domains.
You should always add your internal domains.
If you have multiple domains or email aliases, add them here.

Good to know: Weflow will never log emails or meetings if the recipients or participants are all on internal domains (e.g. john@getweflow.com, susan@getweflow.com, peter@getweflow.com).

Once you’ve added all domains you want to exclude, click the ‘Save’ button.

(Optional) Step 9: Additional exclusion rules

You can set up additional rules to exclude specific emails or meetings from being logged into Salesforce.
For that, you can use any Salesforce field that is visible to the user, such as a picklist on a Contact, excluding long text fields, as Salesforce does not allow filtering with them.
While you can create up to ten rules, we suggest that you keep rules to an absolute minimum, as each rule requires one additional API call per logged email/meeting.

B) Integration user

Step 1: Complete A) User-by-User setup

Follow the exact steps for A) User-by-User until the end.

Step 2: Trigger Integration User

Click on ‘Integration User’

Click on ‘Authenticate as Integration User’

Step 3: Log in with the Integration User

On the new pop-up, enter the credentials of the integration user
A new screen will appear, and API permissions will be asked for.

Click on ‘Allow’ to complete this step.

Step 4: Verify Integration User permissions

Weflow will show whether the integration user has all the necessary permissions to function as expected.
If all permissions are marked with green font, you can continue with step 5.
If not, please scroll down to section 6 - Integration User Configuration.

Step 5: Add users and click ‘Save’

Go to the ‘Users’ tab.
Weflow will show all users found both in your Salesforce and workspace directory with a matching email address.
Add the users for whom you want activity capture activated.
Click ‘Save’ in the top right corner to complete the setup.

4) Integration User Configuration

Weflow offers free support to set up the integration user together with a Salesforce admin at your company. If you want to set the user up yourself, please make sure that the following permissions and access rights have been assigned:

System Permissions:

Update Email Messages
Edit Tasks
Access Activities
Edit Events

Object Permissions:

Account
Opportunity
Contact
Lead
Opportunity Contact Role

In addition, the Integration User needs to have the user permission ‘Salesforce API Integration’ set to true.

5) Business Logic

This section provides an overview of the underlying business logic of Weflow’s Activity Capture solution:

A) Logging behavior

The logging algorithm uses various variables to decide which record to log an email to.
The most significant variables are:
- Primary Contact Email (standard field)
- Contact roles assigned to an Opportunity (standard field)
- Parent Account (standard field)
- Stage (standard field)
In addition, Weflow remembers previously set logging decisions by the Chrome Extension or Outlook add-in.
If an email or meeting was excluded via the extension or add-in, it will continue to be ignored in the future—unless the user decides to log the email manually.
Weflow will always log the email to the contact or lead.
By default, the contact's parent account is also related to the email message object or task.
The opportunity can only be set if there is a logical connection between the contact and the opportunity. This is the case if:
- The parent account has only one open opportunity, which both the contact and opportunity share.
- The contact has been set as a contact role for an open opportunity (this also works with multiple opportunities under one parent account, as long as the contact is not set as a contact role on all of these open opportunities simultaneously).
- The contact and the opportunity were manually selected via the Chrome Extension or Outlook add-in.

B) Contact creation

Weflow can create contacts on your behalf.
These contacts are only created when an email is sent to an unknown email address IF the domain does not match any domains in the exclusion list.
Weflow will create the contact based on the available information.
The fields Weflow can populate are:
- First name
- Last name
- Email
- Account
Sometimes, this information can be limited and not accessible. In that case, Weflow will use the email address as the last name and skip the first name.
If your contact creation rules require more fields to be filled out, Weflow cannot set these fields for you, and the contact creation will fail.
We recommend using an enrichment service in combination with our contact creation feature and automation to fill in the respective fields as needed. For questions, please contact our Customer Success team at support@getweflow.com.

Good to know:

Any Activity Capture user can use Weflow’s Chrome Extension.
With the Chrome Extension, you can create contacts without signing into Salesforce.
Users can quickly create a contact with the extension and then log the email to Salesforce.
To learn more about our Chrome Extension, go here.

C) Domain exclusion

Internal domains

Use this option to prevent emails and events between people at your company from being added to the activity timeline of related Salesforce records and from being synced between Salesforce and the connected accounts. Emails and events with at least one email address outside the excluded domain are still included.

External domains

Use this option to prevent all emails and events associated with a particular customer from being added to the activity timeline of related Salesforce records. And prevent events from being synced between Salesforce and the connected accounts.

D) API usage

Weflow uses Salesforce’s REST API to log emails and meetings to Salesforce (and the other way around).
Most companies have enough API calls available, which will cause an issue.
If you plan to use Weflow to log thousands of emails per user per day, please contact our Customer Success team to ensure that this won’t cause any issues for your daily operations, as this may require some customisation on our end.
If the average user sends 100-200 emails daily, there is nothing to worry about.
Weflow does not need to make an API call for every query. Instead, it caches variables necessary for the logging algorithm at regular intervals.

E) Bi-Directional Sync for Meetings/Calendar Events

Weflow lets you choose between three options to sync meeting and calendar activities:

Workspace to Salesforce: Weflow will only log meetings from Google/Microsoft to Salesforce.
Salesforce to Workspace: Weflow will only log meetings from Salesforce to Google/Microsoft.
Both: Weflow will log meetings from both directions without creating duplicates.

Good to know: If you choose the option ‘Both’, then Weflow will not be able to update meeting events after they’ve been created.

F) Differences between email and calendar logging

There are no differences in the logging behavior for emails and calendar events.

G) Logging to tasks vs. email message

You can log emails to ‘tasks’ or the ‘email message’ object. The benefit of the email message object is that you can see the sender/recipient relationship, calculate reply rates, and better gauge email velocity. The downside is that the email message object requires more data storage than the task object.

Weflow always uses the task object with the subtype ‘event’ for calendar events.

6) Sandbox

You can test Weflow Activity Capture in a Sandbox environment via sandbox.getweflow.app.
The sandbox environment is an exact copy of our production environment with a different underlying database.
You can test everything in our sandbox environment, but to set it up in production, you must replicate the settings and go through the setup flow again.

7) Chrome Extension & Add-in

Weflow offers a Chrome Extension and an Outlook add-in for manually fine-tuning your logging logic. Learn more about them here.

8) Back-syncing emails & meetings

Weflow offers 3 months of back-syncing historical emails and meetings when purchasing our solution at no extra cost.
Wefllow can back sync up to two years of activity data, which is especially useful if you shift from a solution like Einstein Activity Capture or another third party that does not use advanced objects like events or email messages.
Back-syncing emails or events requires 3-5 API calls per record, meaning that large amounts of back-syncing need to be spread out over several days or weeks—depending on the volume—to ensure the API usage does not interfere with your daily business operations.