Thanks to Rich Potter and Thomas Nelson for inspiring this blog entry.

The Service Cloud Console was designed for high volume call centers (Tier 1 customer service/ Tier 2 & 3 product support). In these environments, agents work primarily on the Case and Contact entities, moving quickly from one call to the next. Much of the Console interaction model (Primary Tabs, the Navigator Tab, Highlights Panel, Interaction Log etc...) was designed specifically for this.

Agents in these environments rarely spend time in the Home tab, which is one of the reasons why there is no Home tab in the Navigator Tab's tab list.

However, every organization is different, and yours may have its own unique requirements. In order to support your business processes, you may need the:
- Home tab to show common dashboards, messaging components, calendars and the like

- Task List View page if your agents work primarily with Tasks
- Dashboards tab for agents to monitor performance/ commissions

The Navigator Tab

Adding the tabs mentioned above to the Navigator Tab is easy. I'll be discussing each of the use cases mentioned above in the following sections.

If you aren't familiar with the Service Cloud Console, you can learn more here.

Adding the Home Tab

We start by creating a custom web tab.
1. Go to Setup->Create->Tabs
2. In the Web Tabs section, click New
3. Select Full page width
4. Set your Tab Type to URL
5. Choose a name and icon and hit. I named it "Home".

Creating the Home Web Tab

6. Set the Button or Link URL to
/home/home.jsp?isdtp=vw

Set the URL to /home/home.jsp?isdtp=vw

7. Make the newly created tab visible to your profile 
8. Finally, include the tab in your Service Cloud Console app

The next time you go to your Service Cloud Console, you should see your new "Home" tab in the Navigator Tab.

You may have some questions about the "/home/home.jsp?isdtp=vw". As you may recognize "/home/home.jsp" is the url of the Home tab. The parameter "?isdtp=vw" indicates to salesforce that the page should be rendered to comply and function within the Service Cloud Console. If you're interested, "isdtp" is short for "Is Desktop", the original name for Console. "vw" is short for "view", which is the mode in which the page is displayed. It renders the page without the regular salesforce.com header (this is the list of tabs like Home, Accounts etc.).

Adding the Task List View Page

To add a Task List View tab, follow the same steps as adding a home tab. However, in step 6, set the "Button or Link URL" to /00T?isdtp=vw

Adding the Tasks List View tab

00T is the key prefix for the Task entity. Once again, we have to add the "isdtp" parameter with the value of "vw".

Adding the Dashboards Tab

Since Dashboards is already a tab in the regular salesforce app, adding it to the Service Cloud Console is easy.
- Go to Setup->Create->Apps
- Click "Edit" on your Service Cloud Console App
- In the "Choose Navigation Tab Items", add the Dashboard tab to the Navigation Tab Items.

Adding the Dashboards tab to the Navigator Tab

You will see the Dashboards tab in the Navigator Tab now.

We looked at 3 examples of adding tabs to the Navigator tab. However, there are many other scenarios where this could be useful. In fact, with a Visualforce tab, you could do some custom processing before opening the primary tab. You can look at "The Service Cloud Console: Providing More Context For Your Agents" to get an idea of how to do this. If there are other customizations or blog topics that you would like to see, please feel free to reach out to me or Michael Ramsey.