Salesforce.com® For Dummies®

Part VII. Designing the Salesforce Solution

In this part ...

Back in the day, using a CRM system required a lot of time invested with big-name tech consulting firms, and you weren't always guaranteed to get what you wanted. Even today, configuring data or editing reports in many other systems means getting in line and waiting for someone more technical than you to help. Customers of Salesforce, however, rave about how easy it is for end users to use. But what's equally (if not more) amazing is how simple it is to fine-tune Salesforce to suit the unique needs of your company ... as long as you understand the basic elements of the Setup, that is.

As an administrator, the Setup options available to you are extensive, regardless of what Salesforce edition you have. In this part, we focus on the four main areas of Setup that are necessary to successfully implement and then administer Salesforce for your end users: configuring the system, customizing the default records for CRM, building new records (or getting them from someone else), and migrating and maintaining your data. With system configuration, we show you how you can modify Salesforce for the way that you want users to have privilege to data. You then discover how you can easily customize the pages by adding fields, defining processes, changing layouts, and more. We next discuss using Salesforce as a platform to build new pages and ...