Had a couple of great questions come over via email (labs at salesforce dot com) which I wanted to share here.

Q: In a large organisation who would you envisage creating the templates and what security should be in place. The default after installation seemed to be private on both the templates and the action plans. And not sure that this covered in the documentation.

A: I have left the OWD as default for both objects for now although I’m not convinced that’s the best way to use them.  Depending on your org, you may want to make Action Plans private and Action Plan Templates Public Read Only.  Since the goal of AP is to encapsulate best practices into reusable task templates, the idea is that some expert creates and manages the templates which are then available to all / most users.  These users are then responsible for their individual Action Plans.  I could make a case for keeping Action Plans public as well — say, for example, if your OWD are public for all the objects you want to use AP with, then making the Action Plans private doesn’t really make any sense.

Q: Does it make sense to leave the default New Action Plan button on the related list? 

A: Re: the new button on the related list — in the upcoming new version (probably a couple of weeks out), we’ve removed that from the related list.  I go back and forth about where the best location for the button is.  I like it up top because an AP is generally more about the record than anything else.  An Action Plan cannot stand alone. 

Q: Did you envisage users creating action plans on the fly without a template?

A: Also, re: the question of templates — I don’t think it makes sense to create an action plan from scratch every time — too much work.  Templates are the way to go.