Salesforce Essentials for Administrators

Book description

Discover the administration fundamentals and challenges of Salesforce CRM

In Detail

Salesforce is one of the leading platforms for developing cloud-based applications. Primarily, Salesforce is designed for managing the sales processes of an organization, but the platform can be leveraged to develop custom applications. It runs on the Force.com platform. With the advantage of having reduced development costs, we can deliver applications in a very short time span. With this book, administrators will learn to tackle a lot of things that pop up in their daily routine.

This book is a comprehensive guide that explains user management, profile management, and the basic building blocks of an application. The book proceeds by explaining the troubleshooting skills needed for an administrator. The best practices and disciplines of data loading are discussed in detail. The book concludes with an overview of sales and service cloud features so that the reader is ready for the advanced configurations of this module. By the end of the book, you will be a competent administrator who can manage and maintain the Salesforce data of your organization successfully.

What You Will Learn

  • Understand how licensing, profiling, and security settings are set for users
  • Perform data modeling and use Salesforce components such as workflows, approvals, validations, layouts, and record types to solve business problems
  • Get to know the reporting basics and use Salesforce analytics to build reports and dashboards
  • Troubleshoot common challenges that administrators face in real-time businesses
  • Get to grips with the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud features provided by the platform
  • Utilize tools such as the data loader to load data into Salesforce
  • Load data using an external ID and understand the importance of Excel VLOOKUP
  • Get familiar with the overall administrator responsibilities for real-time applications

Table of contents

  1. Salesforce Essentials for Administrators
    1. Table of Contents
    2. Salesforce Essentials for Administrators
    3. Credits
    4. About the Author
    5. About the Reviewers
    6. www.PacktPub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
        1. Why subscribe?
        2. Free access for Packt account holders
        3. Instant updates on new Packt books
    7. Preface
      1. What this book covers
      2. What you need for this book
      3. Who this book is for
      4. Conventions
      5. Reader feedback
      6. Customer support
        1. Errata
        2. Piracy
        3. Questions
    8. 1. User Management and User Profiling
      1. License management
        1. The User license
        2. The Featured license
      2. User management
        1. Activating a user
        2. Resetting the user password
        3. Freezing a user
        4. Resetting a user's e-mail address
        5. Organization-wide password policy
        6. Expiring all passwords
        7. Mobile administration
        8. Viewing the login history
        9. Network access and profile-based login IP ranges
      3. Profile management
        1. Objects and fields
        2. Tabs
        3. Applications
        4. Page layouts
        5. Configuring a profile
          1. The Profile Detail, Console Settings, and Page Layouts sections
            1. Salesforce console definition and its need
          2. Field-level security
          3. Custom app settings and connected app settings
          4. Tab settings
          5. Record type settings
          6. Administrative permissions and general user permissions
          7. Object permissions
          8. Apex and Visualforce access
      4. Delegated administration
      5. Salesforce A
      6. Summary
    9. 2. Configuring Salesforce
      1. Data modeling
        1. Lookup relationship
        2. Master-detail relationships
        3. Many-to-many relationships (concept of a junction object)
        4. Hierarchical relationships
      2. Workflows
      3. E-mail templates
      4. Approval process
      5. Page layouts
      6. Record types
      7. Formulae
      8. Validation rules
      9. Summary
    10. 3. Reports and Dashboards
      1. The report builder
        1. Tabular reports
          1. Report builder components
          2. Data visibility in reports
          3. The Date Field filter
        2. Summary reports
          1. PARENTGROUPVAL
          2. PREVGROUPVAL
        3. Matrix reports
        4. Joined reports
      2. Dashboards
        1. Bar charts
        2. Line charts
        3. Pie charts
        4. Donut charts
        5. Funnel charts
        6. Scatter charts
        7. Metric charts
      3. Procedure for conditional highlighting
      4. Analytic snapshots
      5. Report types
      6. Folders
      7. Summary
    11. 4. Record-level Access, Security, and Audit Features
      1. Organization-wide sharing defaults
        1. User Visibility settings
        2. Profile-level Modify All and View All settings for objects
      2. Sharing rules and manual sharing
        1. Record ownership-based rules
        2. Criteria-based sharing rules
        3. Manual sharing
        4. Apex-based sharing
      3. Account team, opportunity team, and case team
        1. Account team members
        2. Opportunity team members
        3. Case team members
      4. Audit features
        1. Audit log
        2. E-mail log files
        3. Batch jobs
        4. Scheduled jobs
      5. Folder security
      6. Summary
    12. 5. Session Management, Data Loader, and Data Loading Best Practices
      1. Password policies
      2. Session settings
      3. Session management
      4. Data loader
      5. Importance of VLOOKUP and external IDs
      6. Summary
    13. 6. Troubleshooting Common Problems
      1. Problem statement 1
        1. Debugging steps
      2. Problem statement 2
        1. Debugging steps
      3. Problem statement 3
        1. Debugging steps
      4. Problem statement 4
        1. Debugging steps
      5. Problem statement 5
        1. Debugging steps
      6. Problem statement 6
        1. Debugging steps
      7. Problem statement 7
        1. Debugging steps
      8. Problem statement 8
        1. Debugging steps
      9. Problem statement 9
        1. Debugging steps
      10. Problem statement 10
        1. Debugging steps
      11. Problem statement 11
        1. Debugging steps
      12. Problem statement 12
        1. Debugging steps
      13. Summary
    14. 7. An Overview of Sales and Service Cloud
      1. A sales cycle
      2. Territory management
        1. Basic configurations
        2. Account assignment rules
      3. Forecasting
        1. Customizable forecasting
        2. Collaborative forecasting
      4. The service cloud
      5. Entitlement management
      6. Knowledge management
      7. Content management
      8. Live agent
      9. Customer and partner community
      10. Ideas and chatter answers
      11. The SFA maturity model
      12. Summary
    15. Index

Product information

  • Title: Salesforce Essentials for Administrators
  • Author(s): Mohith Shrivastava
  • Release date: October 2014
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781784398071