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Guidelines

Guidelines.

Well-developed guidelines improve the quality of services, leading to better performance and cost-effectiveness. Salesforce guidelines are meant to deal with topics of usage, management, security, housekeeping and release/change management.

The guidelines within this document represent the consensus of multidisciplinary expertise, formulated in topic-specific recommendations intended to inform practitioners and others who are interested.

Getting help.

It all starts by getting some help and exploring how others have overcome the challenges you are facing. There is a huge community of Salesforce enthusiasts, all more than willing to help you uncover the secrets of success. For a platform such as Salesforce it is impossible to know how everything works — but as long as you know where to look for help, you have already made the first and most important step forward.

Make sure you join the Salesforce communities and also become part of the various social communities and local/industry user groups. Many of these groups organize events and workshops for you to attend and exchange knowledge and experience.

Organization Wide Defaults (OWD).

The default visibility of data within a Salesforce org is controlled by the security settings called "Organization Wide Defaults", commonly known as OWD. Using OWD, any system administrator can define the default visibility or sharing of data both internally and externally — controlling who gets to see what.

OWD comes with 5 options:

  • Private. Records are only visible to the actual owner of the records.

  • Public Read Only. Records are visible to everybody but in read-only mode.

  • Public Read/Write. Records are visible to everybody and available to edit.

  • Public Read/Write/Transfer. Records are visible to everybody, available to edit and ownership can be transferred.

  • Controlled by Parent. The given object inherits the OWD set by its parent object. This only applies to master-detail related objects.

Configuring one of these options on Salesforce objects does not allow much flexibility. Imagine the OWD for opportunities is set to private — other Sales Managers within the organization would not be able to view those opportunities.

Complementary to OWD, Salesforce provides a feature called 'Sharing Rules'. With sharing rules, a system administrator can control data visibility using various conditions based on record ownership or data criteria. A sharing rule can, for example, enable visibility for the rest of the Sales team once an opportunity reaches a specific stage.

Although making all data visible to everyone within your organization sounds like the simplest solution, you should seriously think this over. Setting the OWD to private, for instance, allows you to achieve the same result using a complementary sharing rule — and using sharing rules gives you more control over who has access to what data.