Salesforce Data Loader: Voicemail 
Archiving Made Easy

July 8th, 2009 by Chris Cranis | located in Salesforce, Tips and Tricks | trackback

For reasons ranging from disaster recovery to regulatory compliance, everyone should regularly back up their data. A handful of companies are making a fortune selling subscription-based services to make it easy to backup our documents, email, even our music, right to the cloud. (I’m a big fan of Box.net and Google Docs, which is where most of my data currently lives). Why should backing up voice messages be any different?
Ribbit for Salesforce has given us a new way to generate voice-enabled content and save it as both text and MP3 files. Unlike voice messages that live within Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint, messages that get stored within Ribbit are yours to keep for as long as you want.

As a sales guy, I get a lot of voice messages that are account-related, and that are associated with leads, contacts, or opportunities. I realized I had hundreds of voice messages I wanted to remove from Ribbit without actually deleting them.

While I completely trust Ribbit to backups my voice messages, (which of course Ribbit does by hosting at OpSource), I wanted to keep soft copies of my voice messages myself.
 This is where the Salesforce Data Loader comes in.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the Salesforce Data Loader is a fantastic admin tool for exporting, inserting, and updating data within the Salesforce database. Since all my voice messages were converted into text and sent to Salesforce.com, I’m now able to extract and backup my voicemail. (Note: This is an administrator function only. Ask your Salesforce or Ribbit systems administrator to help you with your backup.)

Here’s how to perform the backup:

1. Find and copy your Salesforce User ID. To find your user ID, click on your name within the Salesforce user’s list. The ID is found in the URL as shown below:

2. Download, install, and launch the Data Loader. Click Export to export the voice messages to Excel.

3. Select Message (Ribbit1_Message_c) and then select an output location for your file:

4. Filter the Data Loader to remove only your voice messages. Select OwnerID from the Fields section to Equals as the Operation, and Value to your Salesforce User ID (from step 1). Then click Finish:

5. Confirm your intent to export this data by clicking Yes:

6. Your export is now complete. All voice messages have now been backed up to Excel.

Open your Excel file and back it up to an external drive, shared file server, or upload it to Google Docs for storage. Enjoy your new-found peace of mind!

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One Response to “Salesforce Data Loader: Voicemail 
Archiving Made Easy”

1. Voicemail Service - Never Miss an Important Call | Business Consulting for Higher Profits Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 1:30 am

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