Salesforce Data Management

With a grasp of Master Data Management (MDM) concepts under our belt, we can now look at Salesforce Data Management. In this chapter, we'll look at how the Salesforce data model and Salesforce licensing work together. The license types chosen for a solution have an impact on the objects available. This can extend to record sharing facilities available in the case of Experience Cloud license types.

We'll look at what data persistence looks like on the Salesforce Platform and how that works when governing solutions on the Salesforce Platform.

Next, we'll expand on our golden record theory from Chapter 3, Master Data Management, to explain what a Single Customer View (SCV) looks like on the Salesforce Platform, and how data from multiple Salesforce clouds and multiple Salesforce instances can be pieced together.

Therefore, in this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Analyzing Salesforce license types and access to...

Analyzing Salesforce license types and access to objects

In this section, we're going to cover how the different Salesforce licensing options affect the objects and standard functionality available to users. Given the vast array of functionality available in Salesforce products, it is important to ascertain what the required objects and functionality will be (from both an internal and external access perspective) so that the correct licenses can be purchased. As expected, certain licenses are more expensive than others—for example, Service Cloud licenses are more expensive than Sales Cloud. In the case of Experience Cloud, this type of license not only affects the objects available for users but can affect sharing rules and role hierarchy too. We'll get to those implications further along in this section.

Because of the cruciality of getting licensing correct, an important artifact produced during the Certified Technical Architect (CTA) review board is Actors and...

Persisting data

Ensuring data is persisted in a consistent manner is paramount to the long-term success of a Salesforce implementation. Therefore, it is important to understand the causes of data quality issues and the techniques available to improve data quality but ideally prevent it from happening in the first place as much as possible.

Data quality issues can arise due to the age of the data, how complete and accurate the data is, whether duplicate data exists, and the consistency in the way data is used. Data quality issues can cause users to be presented with incomplete or incorrect information, causing them to spend more time gathering that information (which may require them to spend time in multiple systems or with multiple data sources). Worse still, customers may be subjected to poor customer service caused by account managers or service agents having incomplete or incorrect information. Lastly, frustrated users may be deterred from utilizing a System Of Record (SOR)...

Representing a single view of the customer on the Salesforce Platform

A single view of the customer (sometimes called an SCV, but meaning exactly the same thing), represents a unified 360° view of each customer. As explained in Chapter 3, Master Data Management, an integration layer can be used to produce a golden record whereby it consolidates data from multiple sources (using an Identifier (ID) registry or IDs in Salesforce against a record). Additionally, data cleansing, deduplication, and enrichment can be included in the process of bringing customer data together.

As you may or may not know, not all Salesforce clouds are on the same underlying infrastructure, and therefore Salesforce produces various connectors and accelerators to overcome this. Examples include the following:

• The Marketing Cloud connector—connects Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud
• The Pardot connector—connects Pardot and Sales Cloud
• MuleSoft accelerators and connectors for...

Pulling together data from multiple Salesforce instances

Salesforce data architects must be able to design how to effectively consolidate, process, and leverage data from multiple Salesforce instances. While there are pros and cons of using multiple Salesforce instances within the boundaries of an Information Technology (IT) enterprise, there are instances where knowing how to best leverage the data from those multiple instances together across the IT enterprise can unlock value for your users. Salesforce offers several options or solutions in bringing data from several instances of Salesforce. These can include the following:

• Salesforce Connect
• Salesforce to Salesforce
• Bulk API
• Batch Apex

These are explained in the following sections.

Salesforce Connect

As explained in Chapter 3, Master Data Management, Salesforce Connect is a method for pulling in data from external data sources, using the OAuth 2.0 protocol, OAuth 4.0 protocol, or a custom Apex adapter...

Summary

In this chapter, we covered a range of topics related to data on the Salesforce Platform. We started by looking at licensing and how different types of licenses affect the solutions we build as Salesforce architects. Different license types afford different object/entity access and functionality. For example, the Service Cloud license allows for entitlements and milestones, meaning it facilitates an SLA mechanism. Without this license, users don't have access to the entities for entitlements and milestones.

We also looked at external user access to the Salesforce Platform through the use of Experience Cloud license types. We covered the differences afforded in terms of object access and sharing functionality and looked at the different use cases for each license type for Experience Cloud.

You may have questioned why licensing was important to cover at the start of this chapter, but by now, you'll hopefully appreciate that licensing can have a profound impact...

Practice questions

1. Which Experience Cloud license type is required in B2C scenarios where access to reports is required?
2. Which Experience Cloud license type exposes the Quote object?
3. Which Experience Cloud license type is required for access to Knowledge?
4. Which Experience Cloud license type only facilitates record sharing through sharing sets?
5. Which Experience Cloud license type allows for the creation of dashboards?
6. Which Experience Cloud license types allow for sharing rules?
7. Which Experience Cloud license type allows for the creation of reports?
8. Which Experience Cloud license type exposes the Lead and Opportunity objects?
9. Which technology is used to surface external data in Open Data Protocol (OData) 2.0 or OData 4.0 format?
10. Which technology is used to process and execute long-running Apex operations across entire datasets on the Salesforce Platform?
11. Which technology is used to read, upload, or delete large datasets on the Salesforce...

Further reading

Salesforce Experience Cloud licensing:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=users_license_types_communities.htm&type=5&language=en_US

Setting up sharing sets:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.networks_setting_light_users.htm&type=5

Salesforce data storage allocations:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.overview_storage.htm&type=5

CDP:

https://www.salesforce.com/ap/solutions/customer-360/

Salesforce to Salesforce:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.business_network_intro.htm&type=5

Introduction to Bulk API 2.0:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_asynch.meta/api_asynch/asynch_api_intro.htm