12 Tips & Tricks for Salesforce Administrators | Force0six
If you’re a new Salesforce administrator, here are some tips & tricks that will create efficiencies for your users and make the long term management of Salesforce easier for you.
1. Brand The Salesforce UI With Your Logo
If you want to have your company’s logo appear on the Salesforce screen, you need to create a custom App underSetup > Create > Apps. An App can simply be viewed as a collection of tabs.
First, go to the Document object and upload your company’s logo to the Shared Documents folder. Make sure to check the “Externally Available Image” checkbox. Note that the logo file needs to be smaller than 20KB and should be a maximum of 300 px wide by 55 px high.
Next, go to Setup > Create > Custom App and create a new App called “YourCompanyName Sales” for example. When creating the Custom App, click the “Insert an Image” button and select the logo file that you just uploaded.
2. Move Tasks to the Top of the Home Page Layout
By default, the Dashboard component is at the top of the wide column of the Home Page Layout. For sales users in particular, it’s better to have Tasks at the top.
To change the order, go to Setup > Customize > Home > Home Page Layouts. Click the “Edit” link next to the layout that you want to edit. Click the “Next” button and then move “Tasks” to the top of the wide (right) column. Click the “Save” button.
Keep in mind that different users can have different Home Page Layouts. There may be some users who prefer seeing the Dashboard Snapshot at the top of the Home page.
3. Change the Org Wide Session Timeout Value
The default setting in Salesforce is that users will be logged out after two hours of inactivity.
If it does not impose a security concern for your organization, this timeout can be extended — to up to 12 hours. Go to Setup > Security Controls > Session Settings.
Conversely, if two hours is too long, you can decrease the session timeout value to as little as 15 minutes.
4. Watch the “Who Sees What” YouTube Playlist Videos
A great way to develop an understanding of Salesforce’s security model is to watch the videos in the Who Sees What: Data Visibility How To’s playlist on YouTube:
5. Set Up the Weekly Data Export Service
Scheduling a weekly backup will allow for recovery of any records that are accidentally deleted and then are subsequently removed from the Recycle Bin manually or automatically (after 15 days). Go to Setup > Data Management > Data Export.
For more frequent and more comprehensive backups to a local or network drive, consider a third party backup solution such as backupify, DBAmp or Reflection.
6. Map Custom Lead Fields on Lead Conversion
Don’t lose important demographic and/or firmographic information when your users convert a Lead.
You can map custom Lead fields to corresponding custom fields in the Account, Contact or Opportunity objects.
Under Setup > Customize > Leads > Fields, click on the “Map Lead Fields” button in the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section.
7. Set Up Email to Salesforce
Email to Salesforce allows for attaching sent and, in most cases, received emails to Salesforce records using any email client, including mobile clients.
Email to Salesforce needs to be enabled for the org under Setup > Email Administration > Email to Salesforce.
Each user should go into My Settings > Email > My Email to Salesforce, copy their Email to Salesforce address and then paste it into their email address book(s). Then, this “contact” simply needs to be BCC’d in order for the email to be recorded to Salesforce Activity History.
Once the contact record is in the email cache, typing the first few characters will bring up the Email to Salesforce address.
8. Turn on Field History Tracking
There are some fields for which it can be useful to see previous values or to find out when a field value was changed and who made the change.
Under Setup > Customize > [Any Object] > Fields, click the Set History Tracking button at the top of the screen
Keep in mind that there is a data storage implication, as each field history record uses 2KB of space.
9. Deactivate Users Instead of Renaming Them
If a user either leaves the organization or no longer needs access to Salesforce and a new user subsequently needs to be added, the old user should not be renamed as the new user. Otherwise, the new user will be attributed with all past record creation and updates made by the old user.
Instead, the old user should be deactivated, so that their name remains attached to any past activity.
To deactivate the user, uncheck the Active checkbox in the user record. If the user cannot be immediately deactivated due to some dependencies, you can first freeze the user to prevent org access.
10. Create Public Groups
Public Groups allow list views created by anyone with Manage Public List Views permission to be visible to only certain groups of users.
This helps prevent users’ View picklists from getting too cluttered.
Public Groups are created under Setup > Manage Users > Public Groups.
11. Use Formula Fields in Email Templates
Many formula functions will work within email templates, even though they are not selectable in the within the template editor.
With the following email template entry, the BLANKVALUE function is used to merge the text “Valued Customer” into the email when the First Name field is blank:
Dear {!BLANKVALUE(Lead.FirstName, ‘Valued Customer’)},
12. Fill in Description Fields
Whether you’re creating an email template, a validation rule, a workflow rule, a sharing rule or anything else, make sure to fill in the Description field.
This will help others (and possibly you at some point) understand the reasoning behind what you created.
Contact us today if you require any additional assistance. Force0six experts are trained to deliver requirements that will produce results. We are your trusted advisor as you transition into the Cloud or you simply need to refresh your search marketing or lead generation processes. We work with our clients to understand their individual requirements and offer various solutions to accommodate these; from a day’s Salesforce training or administration, SEO and/or an SEM kickstart, marketing analytics and business intelligence, or a specific Salesforce system configuration, data migration, or an integration project that requires multiple resources and project management. We are with you through technology.
