Salesforce time-based workflows can be set to fire in days or hours, but the shortest standard time is 1 hour. However by using a formula in a Date/Time custom field, you can trick the system into firing a Time-based workflow in under 1 hour.
Say you have a client who wants a Customer Community to allow external users to submit Cases, these users would have the High Volume Customer Portal licenses, and the Cases need to get re-assigned to an internal Queue. The client is already set up with different workflow rules assigning Cases to Queues instead of utilizing the Case Assignment tool, and they don’t have it in the budget to redesign and set up Case Assignment. Due to some limitations of High Volume Portal licenses, an immediate workflow to update the new Case records to an internal Queue will not work, but using a Time-based Workflow will work fine. The only problem is waiting 1 hour for re-assignment which is longer than ideal.
Using a formula in a custom Date/Time field on the object you need the Time-based workflow to run from, you can record a Date/Time that’s X minutes in the past, and then set your 1-hour Time-based workflow to run off of this. For example, the formula field subtracts 55 minutes from the CreatedDate, and then you have a Time-based workflow that sets a field update to 1 hour from the Date/Time of this formula field. 1 hour after 55 minutes in the past is 5 minutes from now.
Different Values to use in a formula based on when you want the workflow to fire:
Here is what the formula field should look like:
Normally you wouldn’t keep this on the Page Layout - this is to show what the value looks like – you can see the value in the “Trigger Time 05” field is 55 minutes before the Created Date of the record:
And now you can use the custom Date/Time field to set a Time-based workflow to fire 1 hour after it, which will be 5 minutes after the CreatedDate of the record.
Finally you can create a test record to verify the Time-Based Workflow action, and see that it’s scheduled to run just 5 minutes after the time it was created:
You can read more information in Salesforce Help or contact your Buan Consultant for any questions you may have at 410-263-2707.