Roles - Salesforce Tutorial

- [Mike] We're next going to get into roles and the role hierarchy, so if you click on Setup and search for roles on the side bar. You'll notice that the Roles link under manage users is available. So if you click that, the first screen you'll see is the one related to understanding roles and there's a sample role hierarchy here at this splash screen to show you an example and you can see samples for a territory based sample. Where you've got a western, and eastern, and international sales director role and then below that you've got sales rep roles and all of these positions roll up to the CEO and the concept behind roles in Salesforce are that those higher up in the role hierarchy. Are able to see the records of those below them, and so for instance we've got the western sales director and that person is over these western sales reps and so these individual sales reps wouldn't be able to see any records belonging to the sales director because they're above them in the role hierarchy, and additionally the CEO can see everyone's records, and so you can see other examples. So if you had a product based role hierarchy, you have the VP of hardware, the VP of software and the VP of networking for instance and then you've got networking sales reps, software sales reps and hardware sales reps, below their respective divisions. And then another example for company size based sample, and so this would be a company that segments its different roles based on company size. So the fortune 1000 director would handle the larger accounts for instance, and then the mid market director would handle those that belong in the mid market and then Soho sales director would be more of a specific region. So then you've got your reps below them and so this is where Salesforce tries to mimic a traditional org chart for a company, an organization chart if you will, and you have, if you've seen an org chart you usually have a CEO or a president at the top, and then you've got those that directly report to that CEO, beneath there and from there can branch off quite significantly. And so this is a way to enable or disable users from seeing other people's records, and so roles, an important distinction is understanding that roles have to do with the visibility of individual records and not object wide access. So for instance, what we're talking about with roles, is that this fortune 1000 rep would be able to see their opportunities for instance and they may have 10 or they may have 100 or however many opportunities that they have, and then this director may have several different reps underneath her and so those individual opportunity records would roll up and be visible to this director. Now this director wouldn't be able to necessarily see the other directors opportunities. Or see those down here in other sections and that really depends on how the sharing settings have been set up on the object, so the roles enable those higher up in the org chart to be able to see and have visibility to more individual records, than those lower down. So if we click on setup roles, we can see our own role hierarchy, and this is the default role hierarchy in our Salesforce account that we signed up for, and here at the top is the company name and I just previously used Force Developer as my company name, and that's just a fictional company name for example, when I signed up for this account and so yours will be different. Depending on what you chose, and it looks like a pretty flat role hierarchy but what you can do to see everything, is you can click on expand all and now you see that every single piece of the role hierarchy's been expanded to where you have these different levels, and so at the top level now you have the CEO, and then beneath the CEO this next level over would be the CFO, the COO, SVP of Customer Service & Support the SVP or Senior Vice President of Human Resources and the SVP of Sales & Marketing. And then beneath those individuals you have additional roles, not so much for CFO or COO. But when you get into Customer Service & Support, you have roles for international, North America, and Installation Repair and Services and these are just good generic examples of what you might see for a company. As far as for the service department, here's the different roles they may have. Human resources here and then for sales & marketing we have VPs below the Senior Vice President. You have the VPs for International Sales, and the VP for Marketing, and then a Marketing Team underneath the VP of Marketing for instance, and then the North American Sales you have directors for Channel Sales and Direct Sales. You notice as well this Director of Channel Sales would have Channel Sales Team people who are reporting to them, and the Director of Direct Sales has an eastern and a western region. And so the way that you can manage these roles, is that you can see whose been assigned to a role, by clicking the assign link, and I'm going to choose Marketing Team because I previously created a user, and assigned him the role of Marketing Team so you can see whose assigned there, and as I mentioned previously. This free Salesforce account is limited to just a couple of accounts, user accounts, and so I've got my own user account and then you see here, some other unassigned users that have not been assigned a role and then here are users that have been assigned the Marketing Team role. So if I wanted to add other users to this role assignment I would click on their name here on the left and click the button to add them to the right and click save so now I've added Security User there, just for, as an example. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the CEO role, and you see, and this is the same with any role in the role hierarchy if you click on it. You can see the users in the role are currently zero and that's just the related list down here where you can assign a user to this role or create a new user from here and you can see that the CEO reports to no one. They're the top of the role hierarchy. I'm going to assign myself as the CEO of my own fictional company here. So I'm going to filter the list on the left here by all unassigned active users, and is see that there's two active users with an unassigned role, I'm going to select myself, and move myself over to the selected users for CEO section and click Save. So now I'm the CEO of the company. So you see now that users in this role here on the related list, now let's go back to the role hierarchy by clicking the Roles over here in the setup menu, and if you don't want to see this message about these samples every time you go into roles just check don't show this page again, and click Setup Roles. If you wanted to delete a role, you just simply delete it, let's say we don't have an Installation & Repair Service role, just click Delete and confirm the deletion and it's now gone. Another thing to highlight in the role hierarchy is the different views that you can view the role hierarchy, and I'm in the Tree View currently and that's the default view. You can show an assorted list view. And this gives a list of every role in the role hierarchy and just gives you a different way of looking at things. You can also create new views of the role hierarchy which is helpful, and there's quick links here for editing, deleting, and assigning users to the different roles. It also shows who the role reports to. Then you could also show in a list view, and this is more hierarchical in nature with the indentations this way, might be easier for you to wrap your mind around. Everyone operates a little differently, what Salesforce doesn't provide is a traditional org chart view for the role hierarchy and so if you're looking for that, sorry. There may be an app on the App Exchange that can do that for you but in standard functionality out of the box it's just not there, we're just going to return back to the tree view now, and so next we're going to be going into profiles versus roles. We'll going into both a little more in depth and be able to compare and contrast the two. It's a common source of confusion and you need to understand this distinction on the certification exam. Salesforce really does try to glean if you understand the difference between the two in the way that they form their questions, and so we'll be going into some examples of different things related to profiles, and then as well how roles come into play with viewing individual records versus on the profile level. Granting you access to do things at the object level, so stay tuned for profiles versus roles.