Salesforce.com Entitlements

For those of you looking to understand a little bit more about Salesforce.com Entitlements and how it works for the service cloud, here are a few things that I discovered as I worked to enable it for my org.

Milestones do NOT auto-close, so if you are looking to use Entitlements as a way to track SLA's on cases, you will need to implement some code. Never fear, most of the work has already been done for you on Developerforce.com. Here are some links to some code that I found helpful in implementing entitlements:

1. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Case_Milestones_Utilities_Class
2. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Auto-completion_of_Case_Milestones_with_Triggers
3. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Auto-completion_Resolution_Time_Milestones_with_Triggers

I realize that this is code that you would have to use to do this, but I have found really no other way. It's almost as though Salesforce took us 90% of the way and stopped for some reason. I'm not quite sure why.

The next problem that I ran into with Entitlements is deployment. I already developed the entire thing within my Sandbox and then I wanted to deploy to production through Change Sets. Big problem, I see no way within the declarative interface to deploy entitlements from one org to another. I checked using Change Sets and Creating a package and I found nothing. I was DEVASTATED. How could I possibly have done all of this work in getting everything just right to find out that there is no way to move that work from my Sandbox to production. I then went through the tedious task of moving data manually from one sandbox to another. It wasn't until after I deployed all of this work that I found another way.

I have not yet been able to fully test this but, if anyone does, please let me know if it works for you. You simply have to use the Salesforce.com IDE. Entitlements are a meta data component that is not pulled automatically when you setup a new project. So here are the steps to do it:

1. Open the Salesforce.com IDE and create a New Project
   
2. Name your project whatever you choose, enter your credentials and security token and click next.
   
3. Now on the next screen select the option for "Selected metadata components" and hit choose.
   
4. You will notice after the IDE fetches the metadata that there are a lot of things available for selection here that may make life easier. We are going to specifically go and get the Entitlements Metadata. You can do this by clicking on the checkbox that appears to the left of "Entitlement Templates"
   
5. You should now be taken back to the project page and it should look like this:
   
6. Click Finish
   

You should now be able to deploy this through the IDE. Please remember that I had to do mine manually and have not had a chance to test this since. For anyone that does please let me know if this works for you.