Whether you are beginning your Salesforce administration journey or you are a pro—brushing up on administration best practices is always beneficial.
Consider your Salesforce instance a living organism—from time to time, it needs some extra attention.
Over the years, we have implemented numerous Salesforce instances and trained various profiles of users. As a result, we have gathered many nuggets of wisdom, which we wish to share with you here, so that you can improve your Salesforce administration practice.
7 Salesforce Administration Best Practices
- Respect Salesforce’s Data Model
The Salesforce data model offers both standard and custom objects to its users. For instance, Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity are all standard objects, while custom objects are created to store information that’s specific to your company or industry. This model ensures the use of other features and functionalities that are tied into the data model while leaving space for customisation.
Make sure you don’t overload on custom objects without utilising the standard objects as they are first. While it may seem like a good idea, using too many custom objects as a way of replacing standard objects, will not make things more comfortable in the long run and you will end up wasting Salesforce functionalities.
- Be Diligent with Data-backing
We all make mistakes, and a simple wrong move could delete large amounts of data, or modify your records irreversibly. Data backing practice is a must for admins of all levels, especially now that effective July 31, 2020, Salesforce’s Data Recovery as a paid feature will be deprecated and no longer available as a service.
So, no more excuses— you must back up your data regularly. If you need help to start, here is a useful resource from Salesforce.
- Describe Custom Fields
Mainly when you have custom fields linked to integrations and processes, descriptions are usually welcome.
- Leverage Clicks-not-Code
Clicks-not-code is a declarative programming functionality within Salesforce that allows you to make customisations without any coding. For Salesforce Admins, this should be a go-to tool to enhance the platform without the developer’s support effectively.
- Enable Field Tracking
Tracking the field history in Salesforce is available for custom objects and most of the standard objects as well. Salesforce admins can select fields to track and display the field history in the history related list of an object. The data is retained for up to 18 months, and you are allowed to track 20 fields per object. You can then use this to run reports on the historical data to audit changes or refer back to data at a certain point in time. To enable/disable field history tracking for custom or standard objects go to the object’s management settings.
- Deactivate users instead of overwriting them
If you overwrite an existing user’s information, all the previous audit history will be overwritten. You should never overwrite a current user with the new. Instead, deactivate the user first and then create a new user.
- Qualify as an Admin User
Make sure as a Salesforce admin, you are capable of administrating the platform. Salesforce certifications and training are a prerequisite, as there are many things that could go wrong when a complex CRM falls into the hands of those who are not equipped to handle it.
Is there a Salesforce administration practice that you like and recommend? Let us know in the comments below.
