Best Practices for Admins when Entering a New Salesforce Org
These are what I consider absolutely essential to functioning as an organization administrator. I’m sure you have your own list, so this one is mine.
Setup changes
- Company Information >
- set the default system timezone for HQ time
- My Domain >
- Customize your login
- Themes and Branding >
- Create a new theme for the org using their marketing-approved brand colors and logo
- Create an alternate B/W-only theme in Prod for use in Sandboxes spawned from Prod to easily tell the difference between PROD and SAND
- Session Settings >
- Disable force re-login after login-as-user
- Disable “Enable secure and persistent browser caching to improve performance”
- Permission Sets >
- Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation
- When you are migrating legacy data to keep the original created and last modified date fields
- Update Records with Inactive Owners
- Export Reports
- Take away the profile level permission to export reports, and create a PS and only grant it to specific users, ie: leadership.
- Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation
- Enable Historical Trending on Opportunities
- Enable Field History Everywhere!
- Make the email address required on Lead and Contact
- Enable State and Country Picklists
- Sign up for Apex Exception Emails
Special Considerations
- Establish naming conventions early
- Get everyone on a ticketing system
- Use Cases if everyone who has a dotted line to you has an SFDC license
- or leverage Asana or Jira, if not
Support Requests
- Request “Login as User” and “Territory Management” from Salesforce Support
Reports
- Create an “All Ids” report for all the major objects you regularly access, and save them in Private Reports
- DON’T create brand new reports for every task you need to do
- I append a “z” to the beginning of the name of all to easily search them up – ie: zUsers or zLeads
- Filters: All records, All time;
- Unique_[Object]__c (CaseSafeId field) in the first column
- Reference this report for any personal reports you need to spin up quickly and especially any report you’re using as a base for a DataLoad job. You don’t want to forget the keyId for Dataloads.
- Create an All Users report, grouped by Role or Profile, with Full_Name__c in the first column and User_CSID__c in second column
- Also, create a save as on this filtered by Active users
Admin-only custom fields
On the following objects at a minimum – Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Users, Tasks, and Events.
- Power of One
- enables you to summarize data quickly in reports
- CaseSafeId
- enables you to manipulate record IDs in other reporting tools that do not recognize case sensitivity.
- Bypass Toggle
- Enables a customized bypass function on Flows/Apex. When you run a large data job on an object where this toggle is present, you can just add the toggle to your data load and bypass any automations without having to deactivate everything and then reactivate them after the job is finished.
On User
- Concatenated FirstName & LastName field
- For data load jobs: when you run a report with ownerId referenced, the resulting report will only show the first and last name
