Once, I was dealing with was a company based in the UK with customers all over the world. To best serve them, and to align the company with their new SLA’s, they would need all of the time zones they use in Salesforce as Business Hours.
I thought it would be best to bulk upload every time zone that Salesforce recognizes, and then let them assign to their customers as they see fit. This is the way I did it…
The Preparation
The first thing I did was extract some existing Business Hours using the Data Loader. This would give me a good idea of the kind of format I would need. Below is what I got, pretty straight forward (I’ve removed Tues-Friday for ease of viewing).
- NAME: The name you want to assign to a particular time zone.
- ISACTIVE: Whether this particular timezone can be used or not.
- ISDEFAULT: Only one default can be active at any one time, this is the timezone a case will default to if there is none selected.
- MONDAYSTARTTIME/ENDTIME: The ISO format for entering time that Salesforce uses.
- TIMEZONESIDKEY: The text string ID that Salesforce uses to assign a particular timezone.
This is the format you will need to prepare your data in for upload. Here are all the TIMEZONESIDKEY you will need to bulk upload Salesforce Business Hours:
The Upload
I was really happy with my excel spreadsheet creation and tried to upload everything with the Salesforce Dataloader. However, it didn’t work. The Data Loader would not mass upload into the BusinessHours object. I gives the error: “Monday Start: value not of required type: 08:00:00.000Z”. I tried all the different variations of this ISO time format to no avail.
After a few hours of research I found out that only 3rd party data loaders work. If you haven’t had any exposure to the likes of dataloader.io or workbench, they are cloud, browser based dataloaders and I’ve included links to them at the bottom of this page.
Results
It worked! There were a few errors with uploading a few business hours but these were created manually. I’ve included a link to the CSV file that I used to upload these business hours as its pretty easy just to change the start and end times if you have a similar requirement to mine. Happy uploading!
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