The collection of records without any owner are the Salesforce Queues. Only the users having permissions to the queue can examine every record of it and can claim ownership of any of them. Queues are basically used to assign/distribute/prioritize the records to teams who share workloads. Traditionally, these queues are used in support and sales organizations to assign support cases and new leads to employees according to their availability. Salesforce natively supports queues for few standard objects(leads, cases, service contracts) as well as any custom objects.
Records can be added to the queue either manually by changing the record owner or by using assignment rules. The assignment rules can add cases or leads to a queue based on some criteria. Until records are assigned an owner, records remain in a queue. In a queue, any member of the queue or the users higher in the role hierarchy can own the records.
Few more points about Salesforce Queues-
- Admin or the person with “Manage [Object Name]” permission privileges can change the users of a Queue.
- Reassign queue records to another owner and it should be removed from all assignment rules before deleting the queue.