Salesforce.com® For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Chapter 21. Customizing Salesforce with Force.com

In This Chapter

• Modifying standard business processes

• Managing multiple business processes

• Customizing page and search layouts

• Managing record types

• Using dependent picklists

• Setting workflow processes

If you're just beginning your implementation, Salesforce comes preconfigured with a number of common fields in simple layouts for each of the tabs. You could buy your licenses, log in, and without any customization, start using it to track your customers. So why is it that with over 77,300 customers and growing, no two instances of Salesforce are likely to be identical?

The answer is a key ingredient to your success: The more Salesforce is customized to your business, the more likely your company will use it effectively and productively.

If you're an administrator or a user with permission to customize Salesforce, you have a universe of tools to design Salesforce to fit the way you do business. And you don't need to be a technical wizard to make these changes. With common sense and a little help from this book, you can customize Salesforce on your own.

Note

You may hear the phrase Force.com used when talking about Salesforce's customization capabilities. That is the umbrella term used to describe everything under the Setup link, where all the many Salesforce customization features are located. It's described as the foundational platform that makes Salesforce and its many custom applications possible.

We could write another book if we tried to ...