Salesforce as a CRM and as a platform is growing rapidly, and the demand for good Salesforce administrators and developers is also increasing rapidly. The developers or administrators who enter this world often feel the need for a write-up, which will cover the basic concepts with illustrations. This book is an attempt to fill this need. To make the concepts clear, this book focuses on screenshots followed by their explanations. The prerequisite to understanding this book is a basic knowledge of Salesforce as a CRM. This book will cover concepts such as profile management, security management, advanced validations, advanced formula fields, approval process configuration, user adoption improvements through reports and dashboards, and basic sales and service cloud features provided by the Salesforce CRM.
Chapter 1, User Management and User Profiling, discusses the process of creating users in Salesforce and how licensing is managed. This chapter will discuss delegated administration in detail. In profile management, we will discuss how to manage profiles, field accessibility, various system permissions, the need for permission sets, mobile configuration, object permissions, the Apex class and Visualforce page access, and the Salesforce A application for the administrator.
Chapter 2, Configuring Salesforce, discusses the configuration components that cover data modeling, validations, record types, page layout configurations, workflows, approval process configurations, formula fields, and e-mail templates.
Chapter 3, Reports and Dashboards, explains the various types of reports and dashboards. It discusses analytic snapshots and the usage of the PARENTGROUPVAL and PREVGROUPVAL summary functions.
Chapter 4, Record-level Access, Security, and Audit Features, explains OWD, the sharing settings, manual sharing, role hierarchy, and audit features provided by the Salesforce platform.
Chapter 5, Session Management, Data Loader, and Data Loading Best Practices, focuses on the basic data-loading concepts using data loader, session management, and password-protection policies.
Chapter 6, Troubleshooting Common Problems, consists of common real-time business problems and the best practices and techniques to solve them using the components provided by the Salesforce CRM.
Chapter 7, An Overview of Sales and Service Cloud, discusses the sales cloud features in brief, which includes territory management and forecasting. It also discusses service cloud features such as entitlement management, knowledge management, and content management. This chapter ends with a discussion on Salesforce as a maturity model.
This book requires no software. The reader needs to sign up for the developer edition of Salesforce and needs to work with the examples provided in this book to gain greater insights into the concepts discussed.
Salesforce Essentials for Administrators is targeted for all professionals who have just started with the Salesforce CRM or Salesforce platform, and want to explore the basics in a very short time span. This book will help individuals prepare for the Salesforce Developer certification as well as for the Salesforce Administrator certification.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can use the PREVGROUPVAL function to calculate values relative to a peer grouping."
A block of code is set as follows:
IF($User.City = "Napa", 0.0750,
IF($User.City = "Paso Robles", 0.0725,
IF($User.City = "Sutter Creek", 0.0725,
IF($User.City = "Los Olivos", 0.0750,
IF($User.City = "Livermore", 0.0875, null
)
)
)
)
)New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "For example, select Leads to view leads."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.