You’ve landed your very first job as a Salesforce administrator, or maybe it’s not your first. But still, you feel like celebrating on that very first Monday, leaning back in your chair and putting your feet up on the desk, drinking your favorite caffeinated hot beverage and relaxing! Not quite so fast. Being a successful anything requires getting off to a good start on the correct foot and being organized from the beginning. And being a successful Salesforce Administrator is no different. Below are a list of things every Salesforce admin should do ASAP when they have a new job, and even if they’ve been there for a little while.
1. Run Setup Audit trail, the first week you get there. And then save it in as many places as possible. Doing this is valuable because you get to see a lot of what happened in your org before you got there. This will be handy if you have someone state that this or that feature isn’t working. You ask them, when was the last time it worked, and they tell you 4 months ago. You can then go back through Setup audit trail to see what changed and reverse it or find a work around. Users don’t always tell you right away when something is broken. Setup Audit Trail is something that should be run on a regular basis. – It’s also a good way to see if something is going on that shouldn’t be.
2. Create a report of all your active users and find out who still has an active account but hasn't logged in recently. If someone is no longer with the company, freeze their account ASAP, and check and see if there’s any integrations tied to their account. There’s no reason for them to have access to that account if they’re no longer with the company. And this doesn’t matter if they’re for profit or non-profit, or even if they founded the company. And even if they’re still with the company, check and see the last time that they logged in and then freeze their accounts as well.
3. Find out if your company has a dedicated offboarding process. Offboarding processes are not only for collecting physical property such as laptops, building keys, id’s, company cars, and such. They can also apply to company data. This can and should be a time to transfer accounts, leads, opportunities, contacts and cases which is the digital equivalent of gold. All the digital items which help you start, grow and maintain relationships and of course keep money coming in should be transferred to someone else in the company to work on, and keep the relationship going. If there’s no offboarding process. You may need to create one.
Offboarding is the exact reverse of onboarding with access to various accounts removed in the same way it was given, and company property is collected/returned. Remember that you’re safeguarding company data and keeping it from walking off with someone when they leave for whatever reason. Even if you’re using something like Single SignOn you still need to freeze the user’s account. (Single SignOn doesn’t mean they can’t still go to the Salesforce URL and login, if they remember their username and password for Salesforce.)
4. IF you’re not already getting the Salesforce Monthly Feature Retirement Digest, talk to your AE. Or find out who is. Demand to receive that monthly Feature Retirement Digest!! Review that monthly digest to see what’s going away to be sure that it doesn’t affect negatively affect your company. Be religious about this- seriously! Your job may depend on it. You don’t want to walk into work on a Monday, only to discover that something your company depended on for years was retired and you had known about it but not really, because you ignored the Feature Retirement Digest and sent it into the Spam or trash folder and never looked at it, instead of taking steps to address its’ retirement!
5. Go to Release Updates in Setup and review what needs to be done. If need be, and your company uses a ticketing system, create the ticket and work on it making sure that it’s addressed. If your company doesn’t have a ticketing system, now might be a good time to start one, or at least get together a spreadsheet of what’s being retired and what is being added or changed.
6. If you have some sandboxes available and you should, get a backup of your metadata. That way, in case something happens, you can restore things like profiles and permission sets. You can keep an original and then refresh a second Sandbox with the metadata on a monthly or weekly basis.
Make sure that you’re using, at the very least, the Salesforce backup service, and storing the data in a cloud account. That way your data is backed up.
7. Look at your profiles to see how many system administrators you have. Salesforce best practices are 1 per 100 people. Any more than that and you need to start changing profiles. Remember that Salesforce best practices is to give someone only the access they need to do the job they are given, and NO MORE! Don’t accept “But we’ve always done it that way” as a reason to let someone have a System Administrator profile because they’ve always had that profile and how else are they going to do their job! If they say they need it for their job, ask them what they’re doing with it and find other ways for them to do it.
8. Look at the profiles and get a list view of which profile has View Setup and Configure, View All Data and Modify All Data checked off. You will want to remove this access because these people can easily go into Setup and overwrite your work or break things unintentionally or otherwise, and then you have to spend hours fixing things which took them just seconds to break.
9. Do further research on which permissions to remove from users who shouldn’t have them, like Modify Metadata and Author Apex. Those should only be assigned to someone doing development work.
10. Run your org’s health check to see how good things are. If the org’s rating is over 90% you have really big shoes to fill- your predecessor was very well organized and really knew what they were doing. You will likely need to learn a lot, and if they did a good job of documenting everything, read it all very carefully. By the way don’t touch anything. 85- 70 % Your org needs a little bit of work. Start assessing what needs to be done and get going. 65% to 50 % - Wow. you have your work cut out. Roll up your sleeves, get a large cup of espresso, (that right) and get to work. You’ll need every minute of the day to fix things.
11. Go to Login History, and download the sizeable spreadsheet, and figure out who is using automated logins. Things like Clari, Showpad, and other things that login several times a day, automatically, can leave a security hole for you. This is an account that will login on a regular basis, but it’s running on a sort of auto pilot, even if the user isn’t logging in or has left the company. You’ll start to get an idea of what the company uses by checking the OAuth Connected Apps related list or something similar if you company uses such a feature. This will allow you to figure out what the company is using and what you need to keep any eye out for. And if your company does use OAuth or similar software, be sure and remove the connection in the Related list, generally by clicking Revoke.
12. Review your fields – Many orgs, over time, acquire fields, whose reason for existing has been forgotten in the sands of time. Do a review of fields, using either Field Trip, Field Foot Print or FieldPro. Field Trip gives you usage, Field Foot Print gives you usage as well as where something is being used - (reports, flows, process builders, etc.) but depends on apex code being kept up to date. FieldPro will do the same as Field Footprint but doesn’t rely on up-to-date Apex classes. All three are free. All the fields that get little or no usage, (Salesforce recommends less than 30% usage) and that have existed in the org, should be removed from their respective page layouts. 4-6 months later, if no one missed them, they should be deleted if they contain no data, and archived if they have data. Make sure and keep an archive of those fields with data just in case.
Your company should have access to the Salesforce Optimizer App, which looks at your org in its’ entirely and tells you what needs to be fixed. It gives you actionable recommendations on how to reduce complexity within your org, decrease the number of process builders, and even prioritizes your recommendations.
Good luck!
What Certification are you studying for now?
Focus on Force currently provides practice exams and study guides for sixteen certifications
Mary Mendoza
Denizen of the Greater Boston area, cat lover, bi-lingual (fluent in English and Spanish) Salesforce Administrator and BA, always looking to help end users, simplify processes and leave things better than I found them!
