Salesforce How To Educational Series #1

One of my mentors suggested that I create a series of blog posts about how I do my job. So here goes..

I am often refer to my self as the “CEO of Salesforce” for my company. We have 330+ User licenses, Unlimited edition, and I am not only the product owner and “CEO”, I am also the chief architect, designer, developer, admin, trainer, runner of reports, wear every hat in the business. I am the only person adminning Salesforce for my firm, and as the lone Subject Matter expert that means I often lived in the “swamp”  (I am “swamped” with user requests for new features — get it?) and try to squeeze the work of what Salesforce best practices suggest should be three people into one standard work week.

I am not going to detail every little thing I do …just the most interesting stuff that I think might be helpful to other Salesforce admins and SMEs.

Today is a Monday and that means creating some new User records for the new employees starting today who need Salesforce access. I utilize a very handy (and free!) app called Clone This User for this purpose.

I answered a question for a User about why they can’t edit certain Dashboards even though they have the Manage Dashboards profile permission and Editor access on the Dashboards folder.  I was reminded that Users with Manage Dashboards permission can create and clone Dashboards, and can edit Dashboards they create and clone,  yet cannot edit dashboards that were created by the other Users — thereby preventing the User from creating a Dashboard with a Running User that would allow them a view of information beyond their access rights.

Finally, I added a few elements to a Flow that sends an email to a Contact when a record is created. [The Flow is fired by a Process]. I added a decision element to check if the Contact was also a Salesforce User; if so, I created a completed Task assigned to that User with the subject and the body of the email. If the Contact is not a User, or if the User is inactive, the Flow creates the completed Task assigned to the running User. The running User is determined by a Formula: {$User.Id}.