Mastering Salesforce CRM Administration: An Advanced Administration Certification Handbook

Sales Cloud is a product designed to automate your sales process. By implementing this, an organization can boost its sales process. It includes Campaign, Lead, Account, Contact, Opportunity, Report, Dashboard, and many other features as well, which we will discuss in Chapter 5, Getting More Value from Sales Cloud. Salesforce offers various Sales Cloud editions, and as per business needs, an organization can buy any of these different editions, which are shown in the following image:

Let's take a closer look at the three Sales Cloud Lightning Editions:

Service Cloud helps your organization to streamline the customer service process. Users can access it anytime, anywhere, and from any device. It will help your organization to close a case faster. Service agents can connect with customers through the agent console, meaning agents can interact with customers through multiple channels. Customer can also implement Omni-channel to route a customer case to qualified and available support agent. Service Cloud includes case management, computer telephony integration (CTI), Service Cloud console, knowledge base, Salesforce communities, Salesforce Private AppExchange, premier+ success plan, report, and dashboards, with many other analytics features. We will discuss more about Service Cloud in Chapter 6 , Increasing Service Agent Productivity by Using Service Cloud.

The various Service Cloud Lightning Editions are shown in the following image:

Let's take a closer look at the three Service Cloud Lightning Editions:

Depending on the number of users for a rollout, you have to decide how to enable the Lightning Experience for them. If you are planning to do a mass rollout, it is better to update Profiles.

A business scenario: Helina Jolly is working as a system administrator at Universal Containers. She has received a requirement to enable Lightning Experience for a custom profile, Training User.

First of all, create a custom profile for the license type, Salesforce, and give it the name, Training User. To enable the Lightning Experience for a custom profile, follow these instructions:

If you want to enable the Lightning Experience for a small group of users, or if you are not sure whether you will keep the Lightning Experience on for a group of users, consider using permission sets. Permission sets are mainly a collection of settings and permissions that give the users access to numerous tools and functions within Salesforce. By creating a permission set, you can grant the Lightning Experience user permission to the users in your organization.

If you have enabled Lightning Experience for your users, they can use the switcher to switch back and forth between Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic.

The switcher is very smart. Every time a user switches, it remembers that user experience as their new default preference. So, if a user switches to Lightning Experience, it is now their default user experience until they switch back to Salesforce Classic. If you want to restrict your users to switch back to Salesforce Classic, you have to develop an Apex trigger or process with Flow. When the UserPreferencesLightningExperiencePreferred field on the user object is true, then it redirects the user to the Lightning Experience interface.

In Salesforce Classic, users see their tabs on the top of the screen. In the Lightning Experience, these tabs are also available on top of the screen. Turning the Lightning Experience on will provide users with a set of standard objects predefined by Salesforce. The Lightning Experience screen is represented in the following screenshot:

The names that appear in the navigation menu are associated with the objects or the app's tab. Salesforce also allows us to customize the navigation menu to include both standard and custom objects.

In Salesforce Classic, we can switch between apps in one of the two ways, that is, through App Launcher or through Force.com App Menu. On the other hand, in the Lightning Experience, there is no Force.com App Menu. We can find apps by searching for the app name or by using the App Launcher, which is shown in the following screenshot:

All our custom apps, connected apps, and custom object tabs are available through App Launcher. We can personalize the order of the apps on this page by dragging the tiles as per our needs.

The Home page displays key components for each user's day. From the Home page, your users can manage their day, including viewing their Top deals, quarterly performance summary, and the most relevant tasks. Customize the Home page for your users to display the opportunity details so that they can get the most out of the Home page. It is presented in the next screenshot:

In Salesforce Classic, the Home page has a Chatter feed, whereas the Lightning Experience Home page doesn't have a Chatter feed. To access the Chatter (the Feed) on the Lightning Experience, use navigation menu; it's available under the Feed icon. When you want to access Chatter on a record, go to the Collaborate tab.

Global search proficiently finds what you are looking for by breaking your search terms. You can find the global search box at the top of every page in Lightning Experience. When you click on the global search box, you see a drop-down of all your recent items, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you click on the global search from an object-specific view, such as from a Leads page, the global search looks for Leads based on your search string.

Standard objects are provided by Salesforce as a basic CRM structure. These include account, contact, opportunity, lead, campaign and so on. These are the tables that contain the records in any standard tabs, such as Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, Campaigns, and so on.

In addition to standard objects, Salesforce allows you to create  custom objects to store data specific to your organization, which is not doable through standard objects. For example, creating a custom object to store employee checking, saving account details to process biweekly salary, and keeping employee account details private so that only the system administrator and employee (who created the record) can access it. You can create reports and dashboards based on the record data in your custom object. Custom objects are usually identified by a __c suffix.

Let's have a look at the differences between the standard and custom objects in the following table:

External objects are similar to custom objects. They allow us to map the data that's stored outside your Salesforce organization. The following screenshot represents how you can connect external system with Salesforce using the Salesforce Connect.

Each external object trusts on an external data source definition such as Salesforce Connect or OData to connect with the external system's data. Each external object maps to a data table on the external system. Each of the external object's fields maps to a table column on the external system. External objects are usually identified by a __x suffix.

Standard fields are predefined fields that are included as standard within the Salesforce application. Standard fields cannot be deleted, but non-required standard fields can be removed from page layouts whenever needed. Both standard and custom objects contain a few common standard fields, for example, Name, CreateDate, LastModifiedDate, and Owner fields.

Custom fields are unique to your business needs and not only can they be added and amended, but also deleted. Creating custom fields allows you to store the information that is necessary for your organization. Both standard and custom fields can be customized to include custom help text, which helps users understand how to use the fields. Custom fields are usually identified by a __c suffix.

It is a strongly coupled relationship among Salesforce objects, which means if a master record gets deleted, then the child records associated with it are also deleted. In this type of relationship, the parent record controls the behavior of the child record regarding visibility and sharing. It means the security setting of a parent object applies to the child object.

For example, if we create a master-detail relationship between the Meetup and Participant objects, where Meetup will act as the parent object and Participant will serve as the child object, then if someone deletes a Meetup record, all the associated Participant records will also get deleted. The following image gives a visual representation of the master-detail relationship between Meetup and Participant:

When there is a master-detail relationship between two objects, you can create a unique type of field over the master object, called Roll-up summary. A roll-up summary field allows us to calculate values from child records, such as the number of child records linked to a parent record.

It is a loosely coupled relationship among Salesforce objects, which means even if a parent record gets deleted, the child records remain in the system. Here, both the parent and child have their own sharing settings and security controls. The following image gives a visual representation of the lookup relationship between Meetup and Participant objects and what happen when parent (Meetup) record gets deleted:

For example, if we create a lookup relationship between the Meetup and Participant objects, where Meetup will act as the parent object and Participant will serve as the child object, then if someone deletes a Meetup record, all the associated Participant records will still exist in the system.

Let's have a look at the differences between the lookup and master-detail relationships in the following table:

Self-relationship is another example of a lookup relationship. In Salesforce, we can use lookup relationships to create self-relationship among objects; we can have a maximum of 40 self-lookups. For example, a campaign record can have a Parent Campaign record, as shown in the following screenshot:

We can create two special lookups on an external object apart from the standard lookup relationship. They are external lookup relationship and indirect lookup relationship.

External lookup relationship allows us to link an external object to a parent external object whose data is stored in an external data source. In other words, it allows us to link two external objects.

An indirect lookup relationship allows us to link an external object to a standard or custom object. We can only create an indirect lookup to an object with a unique external ID field on the parent object that is used to match the records in this relationship. While creating an indirect lookup relationship field on an external object, we have to specify the child object field and the parent object field to match and associate records in the relationship. For example, we can display a related list of payments from the ERP external record with matching external IDs on the account object.

The many-to-many relationship in Salesforce allows us to link a child record to multiple parents. For example, a campaign is attached to many leads, and one lead may have more than one campaign. A visual representation of the many-to-many relationship is shown in the following image:

If you have two objects, called Case and Article, and you want to relate these two objects in such a manner that one case can have multiple articles and one article is linked to many cases, then we have to use the many-to-many relationship. The many-to-many relationship is made with the help of a junction object. In this case, we can create the third object, let's say, Solution with two master-detail relationships with Solution - Case and Solution - Article.

In Salesforce, only a user object has this type of relationship where we can create a hierarchy of users in the organization. For example, a user can have his manager, and his manager may have senior manager, and so on till the CEO or CIO level. The best example is the manager field on a user object as shown in the following image: