Setup and Configuration

Now that we have gone through the basic Salesforce objects and how they are used in the context of businesses, we will turn to Salesforce administration for this part of the book. Salesforce administration has endless possibilities and we would need a complete book in its own right to cover them all. For our purposes, we will focus on how to navigate the most crucial sections you will use on a day-to-day basis as an admin. Some of these features will be covered in further detail in later chapters of this book.

This chapter is best used as a reference for all the setup and configuration items. It will help you when going through future chapters in this book, as well as in future admin work within your organization.

In this chapter, we will explore the Setup page and the sections it contains. For each section, we will gain an understanding of the different items they include, and what they are used for. More specifically, we will cover the following topics...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, make sure you log in to your development org and follow along as we go through the different settings available to a system administrator. Your development org will be automatically set up with the system administrator profile, but do note that in other Salesforce orgs, you need to have the system administrator profile set up to access all of the areas we will cover in this chapter.

Navigating to the Setup page

Setup is the key to the administrator kingdom. Once you have access to this page, you can look under the hood of your system and make the changes needed to help drive business processes. Let’s take a look at how to get to this page.

We start off on the home page of Salesforce, as shown:

Figure 9.1: Finding the Setup page from the gear icon at the top-right of the screen

Click on the gear icon at the top of the page (1) and then click on Setup (2).

The following screenshots show the landing page after clicking on Setup:

Figure 9.2: Setup landing page with highlighted sections

Figure 9.3: Setup landing page continued

As you can see in the preceding screenshots, there are several areas of interest:

• The Home tab (1) contains all of the settings related to administration outside of the Object Manager tab.
• The Object Manager tab (2) contains all of the administration options related to standard...

Delving into the ADMINISTRATION section

In Navigating to the Setup page, we saw that there are three sections for us to look at – we will start with ADMINISTRATION and what is covered there.

Under the Home tab, the first section is the ADMINISTRATION section. This section allows you to make changes to three subsections within ADMINISTRATION—Users, Data, and Email. The following screenshot shows you this section:

Figure 9.5: ADMINISTRATION section of the Home tab

Now, let’s look at these subsections in more detail.

Users

The following screenshot shows you the Users subsection:

Figure 9.6: Users subsection of the ADMINISTRATION section

The Users subsection focuses on user permissions, user creation, and recording assignments. This is a section that is very heavily used by admins as this is where the initial setup of users and assigning their permissions happens. When a new user is created in Salesforce, a role and a profile...

Exploring the PLATFORM TOOLS section

The PLATFORM TOOLS section deals with the configuration and development features of the Salesforce application. Here you will find workflow automation tools as well as tools for creating and managing metadata in Salesforce such as Automation, Objects & Fields, as well as other items. The PLATFORM TOOLS section is heavily used when customizing your Salesforce instance.

The following screenshot shows you how to access this section on the Setup page:

Figure 9.9: PLATFORM TOOLS section of the Home tab

Let’s take a look at what the subsections highlighted in the preceding screenshot contain.

Apps

Apps provide a set of functionality grouped together. Some of the use cases of the Apps sub-section for an admin include creating an app for a specific division in your company, finding a third-party application to install, and customizing and setting up Salesforce Mobile.

The following settings are available under the...

Understanding the SETTINGS section

The last of the three main sections of the Setup home tab is SETTINGS. This section contains various settings that were not captured in the ADMINISTRATION and PLATFORM TOOLS sections. The following screenshot shows you where you can find the SETTINGS section:

Figure 9.11: The SETTINGS section of the Home tab

Let’s take a look at what settings are included here.

Company Settings

The Company Settings subsection includes settings related to the organization. Some of the use cases for this section include finding your org ID for a Salesforce case, setting up your fiscal year, and setting up company holidays. Let’s look at all of these settings:

• Business Hours: This setting allows you to set your organization’s business hours.
• Calendar Settings: This item allows you to add public calendars and resources for your company.
• Company Information: This contains all of your basic company settings...

Using the Object Manager tab

The Object Manager section allows you to manage customization settings related to standard and custom objects. Standard objects include the objects we covered earlier in this book in Section 1, Salesforce for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Relationship Management.

Custom objects are any new objects you create to support your business process. You can see all of the listed objects in the following screenshot:

Figure 9.12: Objects listed in the Object Manager

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, both standard and custom objects are included.

In the following screenshot, you can see the options available when clicking on one of these objects:

Figure 9.13: Options available in the Object Manager for a selected object

There are 12 subsections that relate to our example, the standard Account object. Let’s take a look at the options here:

• Details: This subsection shows you the details of an object, such...

Summary

Setup is where much of the admin work happens. We took a look at the high-level functions of the sections on this page, some of which will be covered in more detail in later chapters. In this chapter, we learned that there are two tabs on the Setup page—Home and Object Manager. On the Home tab, we learned that there are three main sections—ADMINISTRATION, PLATFORM TOOLS, and SETTINGS. We looked at the settings in these three sections and learned what each one does. We also learned that in the Object Manager section, we can access various settings that help admins configure metadata and customize the application to meet business needs.

In the next chapter, we will take a deep dive into sharing and visibility!

Questions

1. Which tab is used for non-object settings?
2. Which tab is used for managing object settings?
3. In the ADMINISTRATION section, which subsection allows you to mass delete records?
4. In the ADMINISTRATION section, which subsection allows you to create users?
5. In the PLATFORM TOOLS section, which subsection allows you to access Process Builder?
6. In the SETTINGS section, which subsection allows you to see your org ID?
7. On the Object Manager tab, which setting allows you to edit the Lightning page layout?

Further reading

• Explore the Salesforce Setup Menu:https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=basics_nav_setup.htm&type=5
• Navigate the Setup page: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/starting_force_com/starting_tour

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