Concept of Person Accout and Business Account in Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com has of two types of Accounts :-

1. Business Account or normally termed as an Account 
2. Person Account

The basic difference between these two types of accounts is the business model on which they are based. One needs to understand the business model of the Organization and decide which type of account will meets it requirements. Business Account will work in the B2B Industry i.e. Business to Business whereas Person Account will work in the B2C Industry i.e. Business to Consumer.

 

In Person Account i.e. Business to Consumer Industry there is no concept of Contacts as you are dealing with one individual who is termed as an Account. Example of B2C is loan taken by an individual from a company. SFDC CON 201 Certification Question

 

For enabling person accounts, a feature request needs to be raised with salesforce.com and they do the need full. Please remember Person Account once enabled can not be disabled, but they can be used in parallel with the Business Accounts. SFDC ADM 201 Certification Question

 

The change that happens in your Organization on the enabling of person account is that a new record type is created on account with the name as person account. In Person account record type contacts related list on account will be missing whereas in case of business account record type contacts related list will be present.

 

For both scenarios the contacts and accounts will be saved as two different records in the database. For Person Accounts the contact information will come from the standard account fields which are internally holding the contact information. This is the reason person account record still occupies 4 KB of data; 2 KB of space for account and 2 KB of space for the contact record. For business Account we have no such issues as two separate placeholders for keeping the account and contact information.

Different Types of Salesforce.com Sandbox

There are Two kind of salesforce.com environments:

Production Environment
Sandbox Environment

Sandbox is  an environment shared by Salesforce.com for the testing and the development purpose and is mostly used by Developers and Testers.

Production is an environment where the actual users work with the actual data and is maintained by Administrators.

Migration from sandbox to production environment can happen via Eclipse toll or SFDC Change sets. Eclipse tool is a much more recommended approach.

There are three kind of Sandboxes in SFDC and the difference lies in the limit of Data Storage

Developer Sandbox: This is the most basic sandbox provided by SFDC. This comes as free and can even be created by anyone who wants to have Look and Feel of SFDC. It can store 10 MB of data and can be refreshed everyday ( Feature of Winter'11 Release ).This sandbox can not be created from production environment.

Config only Sandbox: This is a paid sandbox and cost around 10% of production environment. This is mostly used when system needs to be tested with good chunk of data. This sandbox can be created directly

from the production environment and can be refreshed everyday. This Sandbox has the 500MB Data Limit.

Full Copy Sandbox: This is also a paid sandbox and cost around 15% to 20% of production environment. The Full copy sandbox of SFDC is exact replica of the production environment and even stores the actual

business data. This sandbox can be created from the SFDC production environment and can be refreshed after every 28 days. The Full Copy Sandbox has same Data Limit as the Production environment has.

The Record Id's are similar only in the case of Full Copy Sandbox and Production Environment as Full Copy Sandbox is replica of the Production Environment. CON 201 Certification Question, DEV 401 Certification Question

It's always advisable to negotiate for these Sandbox at the time of buying salesforce.com licenses as one gets different no. and types of sandboxes depending on the edition of salesforce selected.

Difference between Salesforce.com and Force.com

The biggest difference between Salesforce.com and Force.com lies in the concept  on which both are based.

Force.com is based on the concept of Platform as a Service or commonly known as PAAS where as Salesforce.com is based on the concept of Application as a Service.

So, we can say Salesforce.com is an application build by SFDC on force.com platform and has been made available to people for use at a per month per license pricing.

As a rule of thumb: Force.com platform license is three times cheaper then the Salesforce.com license but takes three times of effort and time to build any functionality which is billed in Salesforce.com application.

Force.com is the platform because of which SFDC says sky is the limit for developing any application. There are numerous examples of the same on Appexchange where people have Build Contract Management, HR
Systems, Social CRM etc.

To see a demo of Contract Management build on force.com Platform CLICK HERE

Dashboards in Salesforce.com

Dashboard is an amazing medium by which the companies whole information can be shared with the CEO as a SCREENSHOT.

Some important things to know about Dashboard are:

• With Dashboard a user can even see the information to which he does not has the access, Thanks to the concept of Running User. ADM 201, CON 201, DEV 401 question.

• One can have only 2 or 3 columns in a Dashboard.

•  In Home, Dashboard component you only see the FIRST ROW of the source dashboard. ADM 201 certification question.

• You can restrict the access to a dashboard by restricting the access to a folder in which that dashboard is placed.

• Dashboards can be scheduled to run any time during a day and you can get them delivered via an Email

• Dashboards can only be created with custom reports as the source reports. One can not have the standard reports as the source reports for the Dashboard. ADM 201 Certification Question.

• Only 20 components can be added to a dashboard.

Inline Editing in SFDC

Salesforce.com provides Inline Editing feature which is applicable to the entire organization.

Inline editing is a feature by which one can edit a record without pressing the edit button. User goes to the detail page, doubles click on a field, changes to a new value and presses save. This process makes sure the field value is updated to the new value.

Inline editing limitations:-
Does not work for all fields, some fields are exception to Inline editing like opportunity stage.
Inline editing can not be turned on for one user and turned off for another. It is global and works for all or none. ADM 201 Certification Question

To set inline editing go to:

Setup - customize - UI Settings - inline editing

Business advantage:- Saves on the no. of clicks required to edit a record.

Point to Remember:- If you have changed a value using Inline Editing but forgot to press the save button then those changes will not be saved and will get discarded as soon as you close that particular window.

Concept of Tabs in Salesforce.com

Few important things one must know about the TABS are:

• Tabs can help you in making the views which help user to see the information at a glance. Example: List of all contacts whose birthday is in this month, list of all opportunities which are in negotiation stage.

• There is a limitation on the number of tabs one can have in their organization, Maximum of 25 tabs are allowed in the enterprise edition.

• For a profile you can set the status of tabs as "Default On", "Default Off" and "Tab Hidden"

• Default On: User with this Tab setting will be able to see the Tab for custom object every time he enters in to the SFDC.
• Default Off: User with this Tab setting will NOT be able to see the Tab for a custom object when he enters in to SFDC but has the ability to add this tab to his view by customizing the tab view.
• Tab Hidden: User with this Tab setting will be NOT be able to see the Tab for a custom object and even will NOT be able to bring the tab by customizing the tab view settings.

• Search is enabled only for those custom objects which have a Tab. So if you are unable to search on a custom object then the reason could be that the Tab for that custom object is not enabled in profiles or you have not created the Tab for that object. DEV 401 certification Question

• Web Tabs are the tabs from which  user goes to the external websites. So use them when you want to divert the user from SFDC to External Systems.

Concept of Roles and Profiles in SFDC

Roles and Profiles are the two pillars in SFDC on which the entire access hierarchy is based.

For a user in SFDC It is mandatory to have a profile but not a role.

Profile is used for multiple things in SFDC and some of the key one's are:

• To analyze the type of SFDC license used by the user.
• To give the access to an object. If the object level permission is missing in the profile then the user will not be able to see the records of that object in salesforce.com.
• To give access to Tabs, fields via FLS, General and Administrator settings.

A role is used to maintain the role hierarchy. Role hierarchy allows the mangers to see the data of the user reporting to them.

Remember:- Role hierarchy is a tool given to developer to meet the data roll up requirements. It need not be the organization role hierarchy.

Role hierarchy can be enabled or disabled for the custom objects. This will decide that data of managers will be seen by CEO or not.

In nutshell profile give access to Object where as role give access to the Records Standartd SFDC Certification Question