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With any application, it isn’t enough to expect that once you are initially set up you won’t need anything else. There needs to be a mechanism in place to regulate, monitor, and look after the value creation efforts of the applications and systems.
And for this reason, here we are breaking down some best practices that any admin, system administrator, asset manager or others in your organisation should run on an ongoing basis.
Users Report and Alerts
A great one to start with. Create a User Login report to show total unique Users logged in per day, here is an article on how to.
It’s not only about users who may have left the company, which you probably (hopefully!) have a process already in place for deactivation. But how about if users are not logging in, they most likely don’t need that licence.
Monitoring of logins is easy; you can set these up with report subscriptions and it can be a proactive process too by sending alerts. Follow this article on how to.
From here you can also understand if you need a simple deactivation policy, let’s say if a user hasn’t logged in over the last 7 days and the created date is more than the last two weeks. So you give time to the new starters to get ramp up first before removing them from Salesforce. This helps you easily understand the login movements.
Health Check
A tab within the setup menu where you can identify and fix vulnerabilities in your security settings, all from a single page.
A summary score shows how well your org is aligned with the Salesforce-recommended standard. There is of course, a trailhead module for you to learn and get hands on with it.
Optimizer Report or App!
In the latest release the optimizer report became an app per se. It’s a great tool for anyone looking after a Salesforce org. It scans your customisations and gives you a list of potential feature improvements, customisation cleanup, ideas to reduce complexity and even some areas to drive feature adoption.
Every single release the Salesforce Optimizer gets better and better, I was lucky enough to chat with the product team a couple months back. So this will be an activity I would high recommend running three times a year after a month or so after every release.
Force.com Source Scanner
Free tool with an optional paid extension. It runs security and quality rules, performs a static analysis scan of all unpackaged code in your Salesforce instance. Check it out here. It’s a great one to run as you walk for first time into an org that you have not developed, but also one to add to your three times a year scans.
Quality Clouds for Salesforce
There is, of course, Quality Clouds for Salesforce, think of it as a top up with asteroids: reviews both code and configuration, looks at production but also development environments, you can monitor and compare several Salesforce orgs in one place.
It’s geared towards the whole Software Development Lifecycle, not just looking at orgs but also repositories, with a new VS Code plugin.
Run your Unit Tests
Unit tests can help you validate metadata changes before mistakes lead to data integrity failures, you monitor for changes in an org by others and figure out if your developers or consultants are delivering on what they promised. Leaving you to learn more on this here with ‘An Admins Guide To Unit Tests from Dreamforce’ by Dan Appleman: https://www.salesforce.com/video/194496/
*Bonus* Community Optimizer
If you are using Salesforce Communities this chrome extension is for you. This is a free plug-in available from the Chrome Web Store.
The Salesforce Community Page Optimizer analyzes your community and identifies issues that impact performance. Use the information to refine your design and improve community performance for your members. I’d probably say to run it on a similar cadence with the Salesforce Optimizer, three times a year.
And for all these tools, don’t just expect to suddenly ‘have time’ for it, add it to your backlog or your calendar in cadences to make sure you allocate the time and effort to regulate, monitor and look after the value of your Salesforce.
