Controlling chatter publisher layout on home page and profile

I recently had a global action that I wanted to display on the home page, but not on object detail pages. It looked like I would have to add this action to the global publisher layout, and then override the publisher layouts on all objects in order to remove it from objects. This would have been a ton of work and was clearly not worth it. However, in digging into it, we found that there is a way to configure that separately, that is not to my knowledge documented.

First a bit of an overview on chatter publishers and where they are configured.

There are 4 chatter publishers that can be configured.

By default, all of these publishers display the Actions that are set in the Global Publisher Layout assigned to the users profile.

To customize this layout, go to setup - create - global actions - publisher layouts

chatter_globalpub.png

And edit the actions in the publisher

chatter_global_pub_layout.png

Similarly, you can easily customize the publisher layouts for any object page layout, giving you the flexibility to set publishers by profile and record type.

See this link for details on how to do so.

You can also easily adjust the publisher layouts for chatter groups, giving you the flexibility to set group publisher layouts by profile. Go to setup - customize - chatter - groups - group layouts and configure as above. This is how you can add the “announcement” publisher, the “add record to chatter group” publisher, and other cool things.

[update: summer 16] the summer 16 release adds a beta for chatter group record types. This allows you to customize publisher layouts by profile and by group record type.

However, there is one other surprising (to me, anyways) place that allows you to set the publisher layout for only the Home page and Chatter profile (independently of the Global layout), and it is….the page layout on the user object!

Go to setup - customize - user - page layout, and override the global actions with whatever actions you choose. These actions will now show up on the home page and in the chatter profile, while leaving your global actions unchanged.

This allows you to set the publisher layouts on the home page and the chatter profile independently of the global layout. And you can assign these by profile, which provides even more flexibility.

Its possible this is documented somewhere, but I could not find it! Let me know if you do.

And, just so it doesn’t feel left out, you can customize the ‘feed item layouts’ to add feed item quick actions, like create new task, or escalate to case. I dont believe you can create custom feed item quick actions, just use the ones Salesforce provides, but i’m still looking into that.

So, to summarize - all the chatter publishers default to the global publisher layout, which can be assigned by profile. The following publishers can be customized, if you want to override the global publisher layout. They can all be assigned by profile, and, as of summer 16, group layouts can be assigned by profile and record type, like a standard/custom object.

home page: user object page layout
chatter profile: user object page layout
chatter groups: group layouts (w/ record types beta summer 16)
record detail pages: object page layout
feed items: feed item layouts (standard quick actions only)

 
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