Salesforce Tutorial for the beginners

What is force.com? Or what is sales force?

The force.com platform is the world’s first Platform as a service (PaaS), enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application in the cloud entirely on demand and without any software.

Why is force.com? Or advantages of force.com?

Force.com allows us to develop both data centric and collaborative applications

A data centric application is an application that is based on structured, consistent information such as you might find in a database.

A collaborative application is an application with data and services that are shared by multiple users in different locations. These applications can be accessed from anywhere in the world with only a web browser.

Salesforce terminology

Reports

Reports are summary and analysis of your data which you can display or print. They provide you deeper understanding of sales and prospecting activates.

Contracts

Contracts are written agreement between two or more parties

Leads

A Lead is not yet a customer but any person or organization or company they may be interested in your company purchasing your product or using your services, you can import lead information into Salesforce by manually entering or importing from outside

Opportunities

An Opportunity is any potential revenue generating event or sales deal that you want to track with Salesforce.

Account

An account is an organization, individual or company with established relationship to your company. Your customers, competitors and partners are included.

Forecasts

Forecast is an estimate of how much revenue your organization can generate or how many items your organization can sell in a quarter.

Contacts

A contact is any point of contact individual or influential directly associated with the account and possibly one or more opportunities. Information gathered about contact including name, phone number, address, position, and company and email information

Cases

Cases are Detail description of the problems, questions and feedback gathered from your customers.

You can capture cases automatically from your website and customer email using web to case or email to case or you can create them manually.

Solution

Solution is a detailed description of a customer issue and a resolution of that issue. These solutions make up your organizations solution knowledge base collection information your customer can use to help them solve problems learning from past issues.

Dashboards

Dashboard gives you a real time snapshot of corporate matrix and key performance indicators. A dashboard is a group of different charts or components they graphically display your customer import data.

Activities

Activities are both tasks scheduled calendar events. You can define and track activities from many different objects including campaigns, accounts, contacts and leads all in one place

Products

Products are the individual items that you sell on your opportunities

Search

There two types of search

1       Sidebar search

a.       Available only when chatter is not enabled

b.      Searches only a subset of records and fields

c.       Perform a phase search, matching words in exact sequence.

2       Global search

a.       Available only when chatter is enabled

b.      Searches in fields, records, including chatter feeds, groups and people

c.       Available in all the UI and setup pages

Creating new app

Login to developer account

Click on your name

Click on setup

In App Setup Section Expand Create section

Click on Apps

Summary: Name->Setup->Create->Apps

Enter values in App Label and App Name fields (these two fields are mandatory)

Enter value in Description filed (Optional)

Select Tabs needed. (By default Home tab will be selected)

Save and click on click on the app name from menu, the application will be launched with a single Home tab.

What are objects?

Objects in Salesforce are closely related to database tables

Object contains fields which are related to column of a database table

Data stored in objects in the form of records, like rows in a database table

Different types of objects?

1       Standard Objects

2       Custom Objects

Standard objects

These objects are provided by the force.com platform

Standard objects cannot be removed

We can extend standard objects by adding own fields to them

What are custom objects?

Custom objects are defined by the developer

Custom objects are native components that model the data we need to store in our application.

(Object is very similar to database table in the force.com platform)

Creating Custom Objects

Click on logged in user name -> setup -> create -> Objects -> new custom objects

Enter Label, Plural Label and object name and description fields.

Within the platform, object name is usually stored with _c appended to the end as a suffix for example Position_c in our case. This identifies it as a custom object.

Fields

There are two types of fields

1       Standard fields (Examples: ID, Created By)

a.       Standard fields are created by the force.com platform for its internal use

b.      These fields cannot be removed or redefined completely

2       Custom fields

a.       Custom fields are created by the developer to store data specific to your application.

Adding/Creating Fields

In force.com platform a field is like a database column

Picklists

Drop-down lists are called as picklists in force.com platform

There are 2 types of picklists in force.com

Standard picklist, in which user can select only one option

Multi-select picklist, in which user can select multiple options at a time

Field Dependencies

Field dependencies are the filters that allow to change the content of the picklist based on the value of other field (other picklist in our case)

Custom Formula Fields

Custom formula fields are used to specify custom formula or user defined formula for the specified field

Validation Rules

Validation rules are rules defined by the user to make sure that the user of the application enters proper data before it is saved into the system.

Page Layouts

Page Layout controls and organizes of the fields and related lists that are visible to users when viewing a record. (We can set fields as read-only or hidden, and we can control which fields require users to enter a value and which don’t)

Page Layouts should never be used to restrict access to sensitive data that a user shouldn’t view or edit.

There are two page layout editors

1       Original page layout editor

2       Enhanced page layout editor

Relationships

A relationship field is a custom field on an object record that contains link to another record.

When we place a relationship custom field on an object, we are effectively creating a many-to-one relationship between the object on which the relationship field is placed and the other objects.

Different types are relationships

1

           Lookup relationship (Creates simple relationship between two objects)

a.       We can put multiple lookup relationship fields on a single object.

       Master detail relationship (creates parent child relationship between two fields)

a.       The object on which you create the master-detail relationship field is the child or “Detail” and the object referenced in the field is the parent or ‘Master’

b.      The ownership and sharing of detail records are determined by master record.

c.       When you delete the master record, all of its detail records are automatically deleted along with it.

d.      Master detail relationship fields are always required on detail records

e.      Once you set a master detail relationship fields value, you can’t change it

3      Many to Many relationship

a.       Many to many relationship can be created by creating a custom object with the 2 master-detail relationships

User Object

User object is a standard object that comes with all organizations on the platform.

It contains the information about everyone who uses the app in your organization.

Junction Object

A junction object is a custom object with two master-detail relationships, and is the key to making many-to-many relationship.

Search Layouts

Search layouts are ordered group of fields that are displayed when a record is presented in a particular contexts such as in lookup dialog, search results or a related list.

Different search layouts are

1       Search Results

2       Lookup Dialogs

3       Search Filter Fields

Creating Object without tab

When you create an object with a tab, the platform provides access to that object’s record in various places other than just the tab, such as in search results and the recent items list in the sidebar area of every page.

Cross Object Formulas

Cross object formulas are formulas that span two or more objects by referencing merge fields from related records.

Roll-Up Summary Fields

Roll-up summary fields are used to display the sum, minimum, maximum values of a field in a related list, or the count of all records listed in a related list.

This data type is available only on the master object in a master-detail relationship

Record

Record is a collection of fields related to a specific item in Salesforce.

Views

Views are list of records matching specific criteria and several standard views are available in Salesforce.

Tabs

There are 3 types of tabs are there in Salesforce
1. Custom Object Tab
2. Visualforce Tab
3. Web Tab

Data Access Concepts

Security and Sharing Rules

·         Object Level Security

o   Allows us to prevent a user from seeing, creating, editing or deleting any instance of a particular type object.

o   Object level security allows us to hide whole tabs and object from a particular users

o   We set object level access rules with object permissions on user profiles

o   Object level security is provided by profiles

·         Field Level Security

o   User can be prevented from seeing, creating, editing or deleting the value of a particular field on an object

o   We set field level access rules with field level security.

·         Record Level Security

o   There are 4 ways of setting record level access rules

§  Organization wide Defaults

§  Role Hierarchies

§  Sharing Rules

§  Manual Sharing

Profiles

A Profile is a collection of settings and permissions that determine how user see the record they have access to what a user can do with those records in the platform

The profile controls:

·         The Objects

·         The Object fields

·         The Tabs

·         The Standard and Custom app

·         The Page Layouts

·         The Record Types

·         The IP Address from which user can login to the app

·         The Hours during which user can login to the app

Access Levels

·         Private

o   Allows access to only owners of records no one else can view or edit these records

·         Public read only

o   All users can view, search and report on records.

o   Only owners can edit these records

·         Public read/write

o   All users can view, edit, search and report on and add related records

·         Public read/write/transfer

o   users can view, edit, search and report on and add related records

o   user can change ownership or delete records

o   this is available only on lead and case records

Standard Profiles

·         Read Only

·         Standard User

·         Marketing User

·         Contract Manager

·         Solution Manager

·         System Administrator

We can never edit the permissions on a standard profile

Custom Profiles

Custom profiles are user defined profiles with customized settings

Apex

Apex is a stored procedure like, object oriented language that runs on force.com platform.

It is mainly used in custom user interfaces and in triggers.

To be continued...