With the rise of Salesforce.com has come the rise of the “Accidental Admin.”
What’s an Accidental Admin? An Accidental Admin is a person in a company who has traditionally been good with technology, so Salesforce.com administration is added to their responsibilities.
Sometimes they are given training and are expected to learn as they go. The following is a short list of things that should be considered the foundation of being a good admin and, when followed, is the basis for a healthy Salesforce.com solution.
Top 14 admin standards all admins should follow:
- Always use Standard Objects as intended.
- Never use Custom Objects to replace Standard Objects.
- Try to never rename Standard Objects.
- Always consider and use the correct data relationship when creating objects (Master Detail, One-to-Many, Many-to-Many, Lookup).
- Always use Declarative Features before writing code.
- Always lean on simple solutions before considering a complex approach.
- Always document as you go, so make sure Fields, Objects, Workflows, Reports, etc. have meaningful names and everything has a description.
- Field Labels should always match API Field Names. Never rename just the Field Label always do it together, no matter how painful the cleanup work is.
- Know what fields should be tracked with Field History Tracking and turn it on.
- Have a pattern to page layouts so that a user moving between tabs does not have to figure out where things are located on each page.
- Make sure Related Lists, Tabs, and Search Layouts are updated to reflect workflow by showing meaning fields and sorting as needed.
- Nothing new to production, always use a sandbox and deploy changes.
- Always understand who, how and when changes are being communicated to the users.
Following those 14 admin standards, you’ll find that you should easily be able to handle any admin requests that come your way.
If you need more guidance along the way, contact us to see how we can help.
