User management – User Management and Security

Welcome to Chapter 6. You are getting closer to the halfway point of the book. In the previous chapter, you learned about the differences between standard, custom, junction, and external objects, and their application in the system. I’m sure this has helped you understand the most important aspects of Salesforce’s structure. Now that we have the structure, let’s take a closer look at users and their access. After all, the system would be meaningless without its users. It’s like a city without residents or Coca-Cola without bubbles. Certain elements are indispensable. So, in this chapter, we’ll take you on a wonderful journey through user management and all the elements related to their access.

I would like you to pay special attention in this chapter to how you can grant specific access to your users, and how to revoke it – you could say that you are somewhat the lord and master of your Salesforce org. Here is a list of topics you will soon explore:

• User management
• Password management
• Controlling system access
• Profiles, roles, and permission sets
• Sharing settings and organization-wide defaults
• Field-level security
• Login policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA)

User management

Do you remember how Dr. Frankenstein created his monster? Just like him, we will create our first user (don’t worry; it will be much less macabre than in the novel). During your work in this ecosystem, you will often encounter requests to create a new user. When setting up a new user, the request should include certain significant elements such as the following:

• First/last name
• Email address
• Username
• License
• Profile

These elements are extremely important; without them, users can’t be created and in the later stage access the system. Creating a new user can be compared to setting up your own account in a new online store. Just as there, you need to provide details such as first/last name, email address, and phone number. Often, systems also ask for a username.

And here, let’s pause for a moment. I want to draw your attention to one important element. In Salesforce, your username must be unique, meaning it can’t appear in the database twice. Can the username be the same as the email address? Of course. But does it have to be the same? No. You can freely manage the usernames of your users. If you are tasked with creating an entirely new org and managing it, then consider your structure of usernames. Think about whether you want the usernames to be the same as email addresses, or just “first name.last name,” or maybe the first letter of the first name, the full last name, and the company domain. The choice is yours.