Reduce Salesforce Profiles for Greater Efficiency

Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Douane James, Salesforce Application Product Manager.

Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation about how reducing profiles in your org can enable faster deployments.

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

How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your org

Douane’s giving a talk at Dreamforce this year so I was excited to get him on the pod and hear more. He recently went through the process of reducing the number of profiles in his org from 11 down to only 2, so his talk is centered around why you can and should do the same.

I know I don’t need to tell you this, but Salesforce best practices change over time. Most Salesforce orgs are built to work right now, which is how you can wind up with technical debt. For example, permission sets have become a much more elegant solution to the problems we used to solve with profiles. Sounds like a big project, but Douane’s here to tell you that reducing the number of profiles in your org is not as hard as you might think.

Profile footprint reduction speeds up deployment

A few years ago, Douane’s organization started using a new dev ops process. And while this made it easier to identify what needed to be built and do it quickly, he couldn’t help but notice how long the deployments were taking. More often than not, the delays were related to configuring profiles. He realized they needed to do an overhaul and reduce the number of profiles in their org.

The first step was to get buy in. For Douane, the key was to emphasize how much quicker his team would be able to respond to requests if they spent time on cleaning up profiles. It also helped that they were committed to gradual improvements over time. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think if go step by step.

How to move from profiles to permission set groups

Douane and his team set out to move everything they could from profiles into permission set groups. They identified a representative for each user role they could interview to make sure everything was still working as intended throughout the process.

When you’re looking at your existing profiles, you need to find out:

1. What are the permissions in the profiles?

2. What permissions are common to each job function?

3. Are there any special cases?

For users that need a lot of special access, Douane recommends creating a “heavy” permission set that allows you to give them exactly what they need.

If Douane has one message for you, it’s that the hardest part of reducing their Salesforce profiles was getting started. And the impact was felt immediately in terms of much quicker deployments and better security.

Make sure to catch Douane at Dreamforce and subscribe to the Salesforce Admisn Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript