Activating or deactivating a user in Salesforce is just a matter of ticking a checkbox on the user's record.

As an administrator, you will often have e-mails from your application's users to reset their passwords. In the user records page, Salesforce provides a Reset Password(s) button to reset a password.

In some cases, you can't immediately deactivate an account (such as when a user is selected in a custom hierarchy field). To prevent users from logging into your organization while you perform the steps to deactivate them, you can freeze the user's accounts. You will learn more about what a custom hierarchy field is as soon as we explore the database relationship concepts in Chapter 2, Configuring Salesforce.

There are often chances when the e-mail address of your user changes. As an administrator, you can edit a user's record and change it to a new e-mail address. The key point to note here is that the user will have to confirm this once their e-mail address has changed. Salesforce sends an e-mail to the new e-mail address of the user, and the user will be required to confirm the new e-mail address via a link.

An administrator is not only responsible for creating users but one of the common tasks of an admin is to also maintain the security of the application.

Click on your name and then navigate to Setup | Security Controls (under Administer) | Password Policies.

You will see some self-explanatory fields on the form to set a password policy.

This is a very sensitive step and one must think twice before expiring every user's password. You can find this option by navigating to Setup | Security Controls | Expire All Passwords.

Salesforce provides some mobile applications out of the box for its users, which can be installed from the App store (for Apple devices) or the Google Play store ( ) (for Android devices). Some of the commonly provided applications are as follows:

A subset of the user's Salesforce information is stored locally on the device, providing access to the user's most critical information even in the absence of a wireless signal.

In addition, the mobile application periodically (and automatically) polls Salesforce.com for new and updated records, ensuring that the device data is always kept up to date. Salesforce Classic provides the user with the ability to view and edit data, track activity history, log calls and e-mails, and view dashboards.

Let's explore where we have to configure all this as an administrator. Click on your name and navigate to Setup | Mobile Administration.

Navigation refers to the navigation tabs for Salesforce 1 applications. Salesforce 1 settings help you configure a new logo and branding for the Salesforce 1 mobile application for your organization. Salesforce Classic is the settings option for the Salesforce Classic app. The Mobile Dashboards settings are for a mobile dashboard application.

Administrators can monitor the successful and failed login attempts for their organization and enabled portals. The columns on this page provide information about each login attempt. The login history page displays the most recent 20,000 entries in the login history database. If you need to see more records, you can download the information to a CSV or GZIP file.

You will find this login history in the user record-related list, as shown in the following screenshot:

To understand this topic, let's explain with the help of the following flowchart how authentication in Salesforce.com works once the user logs in. Under Profiles, we can set the Login Hours and Login IP Ranges options. Similarly, by navigating to Setup | Security Controls (under Administer) | Network Access, you have the option to whitelist some of the IPs.

This flowchart is self-explanatory and as you can see, if the restriction is at the profile level, then Salesforce won't allow you to log in.

If your IP range is mentioned in the Network Access page, you don't need a security token, which is a self-generated token specific to a user that is needed along with the password to access Salesforce from external client applications (such as Dataloader, Soap UI, and so on).

Just like any other database, Salesforce has its integrated database that comes with the organization once you purchase it. You have the ability to create objects and form fields related to an object through point and click, and hence this eliminates the need for separate database administrators such as PL/SQL.

The creation of these objects and fields can be done via simple clicks and not through any code, and this makes life simpler.

To create objects, you will need to click on your name and navigate to Setup | Create | Objects. The sample form to create objects is shown in the following screenshot:

Once you create objects, you can associate fields to them again through point and click. You can assign data types to fields by selecting an option through the radio buttons.

Fields have field-level security that decides whether a profile has API access to a field or not. We will explore this more in the Configuring a profile section when we dive deeper.

On the same screen, you will see the Edit Record Name Label and Format section. This defines how you want to address your data for an object. For example, if you create an account, it will definitely be addressed by a name, but if you create a transaction receipt, it should be an autogenerated number.

The optional features available on this screen are as follows:

Tabs provide a UI to access objects and fill data or records into objects. Objects are like tables in conventional databases and filling data (a layman's language term) is equivalent to inserting rows or records into the objects in Salesforce. For a standard object, we will have default tabs, while for custom objects, tabs have to be created by navigating to Setup | Create | Tabs. Again, when we explore more about profiles, we will see how we can hide a tab, keep the default on, or keep the default off for various profiles.

Flexi tabs can be used in Salesforce 1. For more information, refer to https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=creating_flexipage_tabs.htm&language=en_US.

An application will involve a collection of tabs that can be controlled for each profile. Profiles can be configured to give access to only the selected application. You can create apps by navigating to Setup | Create | Apps.

The fields that we created for objects are organized to be viewed for various profiles with the help of page layouts. For each profile, we have the option to configure page layouts for that profile.

A page layout is edited with the help of the edit layout link on the page block, which helps us to organize fields and sections. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Let's navigate to one of the profiles in order to explore the settings that are provided by the profiles, which govern the application.

Click on your name and navigate to Setup | Manage Users | Profile. So, let's scan from the top page of the profile to the bottom and understand the importance of each of the sections.

The Profile Detail, Console Settings, and Page Layouts sections

The Profile Detail section consists of the User license that a profile holds. Any user assigned to this profile will inherit the license specified in the profile.

The Page Layouts section helps in the page layout assignment. Each profile needs a page layout assignment, and this section helps in assigning the page layout.

The Console Settings section is for the console assignment of profiles.

Salesforce console definition and its need

A Salesforce console is designed to boost productivity for users in a fast-paced environment. The console's dashboard-like interface improves the Agent console by eliminating time-consuming clicking and scrolling, so you can quickly find, update, and create records.

The Salesforce console streamlines access to the data and features you need the most. For example, service agents can use multiple applications at once and preserve the context of cases as priorities change. Using the sales console, sales reps can easily contact leads, assess companies, identify key contacts, and access sales intelligence.

• 1: Select an object to view in the Salesforce console navigation list. For example, select Leads to view leads. The administrator can choose which objects are available.
• 2: Records are displayed in a list, which you can pin on the left or the top of the screen. Select one or more records to be displayed in the primary tabs.
• 3: Selected records appear in primary tabs. You can work with multiple tabs simultaneously.
• 4: The highlight panel can be configured separately for each object to show the key information related to the record in the primary tab.
• 5: Open more than one subtab to quickly switch between multiple related records.
• 6: View and interact with the subtab content in the detail area.

Custom app settings and connected app settings

For each profile's details page, you will see the custom app and connected app settings option, and it makes sense not to expose each application to all the profiles. So, this option allows the admin to select the application that should be visible to a profile, and one application can be made default for the profile. The applications that are not checked imply that the users belonging to those profiles won't have access to the unchecked applications at all.

Connected apps provide access to the Salesforce data for external systems (generally for OAUTH 2.0 for mobile apps or external third-party apps). These can also be configured at the profile level similar to the custom app settings:

Administrative permissions and general user permissions

The administrative and general user permissions of profiles provide the capability and access rights for some significant functionalities of the platform. For example, the View Setup and Configuration setting will allow users of profiles to view the Setup menu. Similarly, View Encrypted Data will allow a profile user to view the encrypted fields. The settings are shown in the following screenshot:

Since the aim of this book is to just explain the concepts, I recommend users to further explore the topic with the help of the Help & Training documentation of Salesforce.

Object permissions

For the time being, as we have not discussed the security of the platform, we will not worry much about the View All or Modify All option. For the objects that we build in Salesforce, we can set whether the profile users can edit the record (Edit), have only read access to a record (Read), create a record (Create), or delete a record from the database (Delete). In short, we call it CRUD access.

Apex and Visualforce access

Apex and Visualforce are used to customize the business process with code. As an admin, you don't have to go deep into this if you are new to the platform. At the profile level, we can allow these classes and pages if they are needed for a profile.

Note that the login IP restriction and login hours options we discussed are profile-specific. The options for Apex and Visualforce are shown in the following screenshot: