Master User Access with Cheryl Feldman

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Director of Product Management at Salesforce covering all user access features.

 

Join us as we chat about best practices for configuring user access and what Cheryl is working on to help you out.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman.

Everything user access

We’re so excited to have Cheryl back on the pod to talk permissions and more. As a product area lead, she’s in charge of all the features you use every day to define user access and user management. Think things like user records, profiles, permission sets, permission set groups, roles, org-wide default, etc.

 

As an admin and manager of admin for 18 years, Cheryl recognizes just how much work goes into configuring user access. That’s why her team is hard at work to make everything easier for you and, in the meantime, she’s here to share best practices that might help you out.

The right amount of access

Cheryl recommends thinking about user access from the eye of the principle of least privilege “You want to think about the least amount of access somebody needs to do their job, you don’t want to give them any less or any more,” she says.

Think about if you have a bunch of personas that need object access to the account object. If you do that via profiles, you’d need to go through every profile and modify them if something changes. It’s simpler, instead, to create one wide permission set for all of your account access and then use permission set groups to mute what you don’t want.

It’s definitely a lot of work to set up, but it’ll save you so much time in the long run because your permission sets can be reused.

What’s next for user access in Salesforce

If you’re looking to evaluate user access in your org, you should know that Cheryl and her team have put out several tools to help you. They’ve created an app, User Access and Permissions Assistant, that helps you understand what a user has access to and how they are getting that access. And there’s more coming in the Winter ‘24 release, including user access reporting on standard reports and dashboards.

Looking forward, they’re releasing a new feature (currently in beta) called User Access Policies. It allows you to describe the type of users you want added to a specific group, or permission set, or profile, and automatically assign them to it when a user is created or updated.

Cheryl is on a mission to, as she puts it, “summary all of the things.” It shouldn’t be so hard to figure out what a user has access to and why. That’s why she needs your help. Check out the links below to the IdeaExchange to see if you might be able to join Cheryl on her quest to simplify user access in Salesforce.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Resources

• Video series: Who Sees What in Salesforce

• App: User Access and Permissions Assistant

• Feature: Enable User Access Policies (Beta)

• IdeaExchange: ​​View & Manage Object CRUD Access in Object Manager

• IdeaExchange: Access Summary on User

Social

• Cheryl: @CherFeldman

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Mike on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mikegerholdt/

• Mike on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@salesforce.mike

• Mike on X: @MikeGerholdt

• Gillian on X: @GillianKBruce