Permission Sets for Summer 13

It should come as no surprise to anyone that we here at Arkus are a big fan of Permission Sets. Not only did some of us have something to do with their birth at Salesforce but we built a free tool to manage their assignment in mass called The Permissioner. Now that I have that shameless plug out of the way, let’s get into some new Permission Sets in the Summer 13 release that are worth a second look.

Record Types

While it was mentioned in the blog post by @JustEdelstein last week, it can do no harm to mention such a great feature again. New in the Summer 13 is the ability to use Permission Sets to control access to create Record Types. The use cases for this are almost limitless so go back and re-read the release notes section which deep dives into the how.

Allow Email Based Identity

On the security front Salesforce is rolling out SMS Identity Confirmation for all users with verified mobile phones. This replaces the email based identity confirmation for users who enable it. If your users are not connected by mobile phones or that isn’t a good option you might want to assign the “Allow email-based identity confirmation” Permission Set to your users to let them continue to stay on email. This might also be used as a way to allow you some time to figure out how to roll out the SMS based identity.

Salesforce Touch

While Salesforce Touch went GA prior to the Summer 13 release this is a good time to remind everyone about the features and what it means for you Permission Set junkies. Salesforce Touch is a new mobile view of Salesforce based in HTML5 allowing for easier navigation and manipulation of data. While you still login to Salesforce it looks much different with features like swiping and overlays that work better on mobile devices. Aside from all the new features in Salesforce Touch it should be known that it uses the same security settings of profiles and Permission Sets. This means that any assigned Permission Sets around things like Record Types will be inherited by Touch. A little bit of “Can’t Touch This” just got easier.

Community Membership

One of the jaw dropping new features coming in Summer 13 are Salesforce Communities which could be easily described as Portals 2.0. They are based in the Chatter suite of features and will allow for external users to collaborate with internal users in a branded workspace. While we have not gone hands on with Communities yet, we do know that the release notes for them are littered with mentions of Permission Sets. Out of the box Communities give access based on profile, which is not very granular so Salesforce highly recommends using Permissions Sets to grant access to newly formed communities at the user level. I wonder how you could assign a whole bunch of users the same community Permission Set at the same time?

If you know and love Permission Sets hopefully these new ways to use them in Summer 13 will be helpful. If you have never heard of them before, dive into our blog archive here and read up on them.

Are you a Permission Set junkie or just love The Permissioner too much to handle? Leave some comments below or hit us up on Facebook or @JasonMAtwood