In the previous chapter, we went through ways to set up a developer account, the login concept, and what happens once you log in to Salesforce.com. Now, we will move forward to the next step. This feature is important as it is used to provide all the basic information about your company, such as the local address and phone numbers.

Let's start with an example. Appiuss Inc. just brought Salesforce Enterprise Edition (EE). Now the managers Sara Bareilles and Robby Williams are keen to know how to update the company information, its contact details, the default time zone, and set the corporate currency.

Once the company has purchased the Salesforce organization, the company has to set up its profile. Under the heading Company Profile in the Setup tab, there are various setups available as shown in the following screenshot:

At any time, the system administrator can change the corporate currency of the organization. To do this, follow these steps:

A fiscal year or financial year is a period of time used to calculate annual (yearly) financial statements in businesses and other organizations. The system administrator can set the fiscal year for your organization. The fiscal year settings are used to report on the fiscal year timeline.

Salesforce supports two types of fiscal years:

Business hours are the hours of the day in which business is generally conducted. These are especially applicable for the customer support team to track the operating hours of the customer support. For your Salesforce organization, you can configure multiple business hours. Business hour settings apply to case-related information about escalation rules and case milestones in the entitlement processes.

Once the business hours are set, they can be used to set the time at which a support team will be available to work on the case. Business hours can also be specified when making the escalation rules. Setting the business hours on the escalation rules, results in the case getting automatically updated and escalated when the escalation rules are within the time and location of the rule.

Let's assume that your organization's working hours are from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and a case is raised at 4:00 p.m. The escalation time for this case is 2 hours if the case...

Let's start with an example. Sara Bareilles is working as a support agent in a company. She is resolving an ample amount of cases per day, and the response time for every case is 3 hours. Now, she is worried because April 18 is a holiday for Good Friday and if cases come in on that day, they will be escalated to the manager.

Holiday settings define that your organization is not working on that day. If some cases are raised on that day and waiting for a service agent response, Salesforce will not count that day as a working day and the case will not be escalated.

As Salesforce is being used across the globe and we all use different languages to communicate, Salesforce supports multiple languages. The Salesforce web user interface, Salesforce for Outlook, Connect for Outlook, Connect Offline, and Connect for Office are all available in various languages.

The Salesforce web user interface supports two language settings.

Profiles are a way to customize the Salesforce overall experience of a user. Profiles are used to decide the data security in a Salesforce organization by granting object-level permissions and Field-Level Security that decide whether the fields need to be shown to a specific set of users. Profiles have certain rules or settings that we can set in order to grant or restrict a set of user permissions. Roles decide data/record-level access in Salesforce (that is, the records that you can access), and profiles decide what users can see in those records (that is, fields, related lists, and apps).

Let's start with an example. In the roles section, we created a new role for the organization. Sagar Pareek is the system administrator and he wants to maintain data visibility based upon the said role, but in Salesforce, roles can only maintain data/record-level access, so he has to go with the profile feature.

In Salesforce, users have only one profile, but sometimes you're required to assign more than one profile to users based upon business requirements. A permission set is a group of settings and permissions that gives users access to various apps and functions. The settings and permissions in permission sets are similar to those in profiles, but it extends users' functional access without changing their profiles.

Let's start with an example. Sara Bareilles (Profile - TL) is working as a team lead in Appiuss and her manager Rakesh Gupta (Profile - PM) is going on leave for a week, so Sara is responsible for Rakesh Gupta's work. As both of them have different profiles, Sara Bareilles does not have the access that Rakesh Gupta has; in this case, you can use permission sets.

To get more out of Salesforce, we have to allow our business users to access Salesforce. For this, a system administrator has to set up his or her user account. Before setting up a user account, the system administrator needs to gather basic information about users and their preferences to fill out a few mandatory fields. These fields are as follows:

Let's start with an example. Tony Cook is a sales manager at Appiuss. He is trying to log in to Salesforce with his credentials but has forgotten his password and exceeded the maximum invalid login attempts set by his organization's password policies. As a result, his account gets locked. You can go to the user's detail page and in the login history list and check when the password lockout happened under Status.

In the Winter '14 release, Salesforce launched a new feature called Freeze user's account. Let's start with an example. In this case, Sara Bareilles is working as a sales manager in Appiuss. She is referenced in many workflows and approval process e-mail notifications. Today is her last day at Appiuss, so as per the company policy, the system administrator has to deactivate her user account after business hours. However, as she is referenced in many places, it will take time to deactivate her user account. First, the system administrator has to remove her user reference from everywhere. In this case, it's better to freeze her user account so that she can't access her account anymore.

To freeze a user's account, follow these steps: