Launchpad Lesson 5 - Profiles

Welcome back. All right, in this lesson, we're going to discuss profiles in Salesforce. Every one of your users must be assigned a specific profile.

A profile in Salesforce is used to control a user's permissions. What we mean by that is that a profile dictates what that user can see in Salesforce and what they can do in Salesforce.

In this lesson, we're going to demonstrate how to create two profiles. We're going to create one for your salespeople, and then we're going to build off of that one to create another for the sales manager.

And we'll give the manager slightly more permissions than we give to the salesperson.

Okay. There are two types of profiles in Salesforce: standard profiles and custom profiles. Standard profiles are already there when you buy Salesforce and cannot be changed. They're only meant, however, to serve as an example of what you need.

You shouldn't be assigning your users to a standard profile. Salesforce intends for you to copy or clone a standard profile and then make modifications as needed to create your own custom profiles.

The only exception to this rule is the standard System Administrator profile, which you will use as is. It is designed to give you the broadest permissions possible.

Let's have a look now at a profile in Salesforce and outline some of the settings that you can control.

Let's go to our Setup area and, in the Quick Find box, start typing "User Management" and then select the menu option for User Management Settings.

From this menu, find Enhanced Permission Set Component Views and Enhanced Profile User Interface and toggle both of these switches to enable them.

Now go back to the Quick Find box and start typing the word "Profiles" and select it when it appears.

Look through this list to find the profile for Standard User and then select it.

The first time going through this, you'll likely be prompted with a little yellow box to learn more and take a tour on Enhanced Profile User Interface. And in fact, that's not a bad idea, but you can always decline by clicking No Thanks.

Now select the Clone option up top.

Let's call your new custom profile Sales User.

Click Save and then we'll start customizing.

First, click on Assigned Apps and then click Edit. Let's remove all of the assigned apps except for the Sales and Sales Console apps.

Remember, in the last lesson we discussed what an app was. All we're doing here is ensuring that anyone assigned to this Sales User profile will only have access to these applications.

The reason we like to do this is that it's always preferable to give your users as few choices as possible. The goal here is to direct our users to exactly where we want them to go or what we want them to see instead of them having to guess.

Now change the default to the standard Lightning Sales and get rid of the access for the standard Sales app. This is for the older version of Salesforce called Classic. So your users don't need that.

Now click Save to save these settings.

Next, click on the drop-down arrow beside Assigned Apps and select Object Settings. This is where we will change the access at an object level for our Sales User profile.

Now, there is pretty much an infinite choice of possibilities for these settings, but we're going to show you a strong recommendation for how you should start.

Select the Accounts object and then click Edit.

For Tab Settings, there are three options: Tab Hidden, Default Off, and Default On. This controls if a user can see this specific object on their app in Salesforce.

It's an Account object, so it makes sense for a Sales User to leave it as Default On.

For Page Layout, if we had created new page layouts for the Account record, here's where we could assign them to this Sales User. We'll learn about page layouts in a later lesson. So, for now, we leave this as is.

Now, let's look at Object Permissions.

Looking at the specific permissions for the Account object, let's remove the Delete permission, which is really a best practice on all of the objects for selected users, certainly your sales users.

You really don't want to allow your sales team to delete records. And you can decide whether or not to give management this permission.

We won't demo this, but we would strongly encourage that you follow this same set of instructions to remove the Delete permission for this profile for the Lead, Contact, and Opportunity objects as well.

Now, besides the standard Read, Create, Edit, and Delete permissions, you'll also see View All and Modify All.

View All refers to the ability for a user with this profile to read all of the Account records, and Modify All refers to the ability to edit all of the Account records.

Now, these are considered admin-level functions, meaning that they will override any other security or permission setting.

But as security is such a vast topic, we could literally create an entire course just on security settings. We're not going to cover it in this course.

Hence, the system you set up with Launchpad will be open, meaning everyone can see and edit all of the records. So, View All and Modify All would override any of these settings.

Hence, we advise you to keep these blank. So, if you do add more security features later on, these two settings won't override them.

Below Object Permissions, you'll find Field Permissions. Here you can remove the ability for this Sales User profile to read or edit a specific field.

Now, why would you do this? Let me give you an example.

See this field for Account Number? Well, it's a standard field on the Account record, meaning it comes pre-built, and you can use it for whatever you want or choose not to use it.

But let's say that you've decided to reserve it for your accounting team to give an internally designated number to all of your accounts.

And while you may want the salesperson to see this number, you only want the accounting team to be able to edit this number. So, we could check the Read Access option, but leave the Edit Access unchecked.

The rest of these default settings are fine for now, but as you add new fields and you start to think more about the way your team will be using Salesforce, you'll want to come back here and make sure users have the most appropriate Read and Edit permissions for your business.

Now scroll up and click Save.

Now let's click this drop-down arrow by Object Settings and select System Permissions and then click Edit.

From this list, we're going to enable Create and Customize Dashboards, Drag and Drop Dashboard Builder, Edit My Dashboards, and Edit My Reports.

Next, the default setting for Export Reports is enabled. You'll need to make a decision if you want your sales users to be able to export data that they can see in a Salesforce report into Excel.

If you're concerned about your data security, we recommend disabling this feature.

Now, disable Invite Customers to Chatter.

Enable Report Builder in Lightning Experience, Schedule Reports, and Subscribe to Dashboards, and disable View Setup and Configuration.

Now scroll up and click Save and then click Save again on this box.

You may, of course, want to modify these for your own specific needs, but generally these are the primary changes that we would suggest for a typical Sales profile.

Now, we're going to build a Sales Manager profile. As an example only, we're going to give the Sales Manager three permissions that the Sales User won't have, namely Edit the Account Number, Delete Accounts, and Export Reports.

You obviously should decide what permissions to grant to your sales leadership.

But check this out. We don't need to do all of this work over again. We just need to clone the Sales profile and make these changes.

So, we'll select Profiles, find the Sales User profile, click Clone, call the new profile Sales Manager, and click Save.

Go to Object Settings, then Accounts.

Click Edit and then go to Object Permissions.

Grant Delete access. Then go to Field Permissions and grant Edit access to the Account Number field.

Scroll back up and click Save.

Now, from the drop-down arrow, click System Permissions, Edit, and enable Export Reports.

Scroll up and click Save.

So, we've just created two custom profiles, one for a salesperson, the other for a sales manager.

In an upcoming lesson on User Management, we'll be creating new users and then assigning them to one of these two profiles.

Next up, though, is setting up your applications.

We'll talk with you then.