The first habit we covered in our Essential Habits for Salesforce Admins Trailhead Module was user management, because making sure your users have the right access to the right data, at the right time, is key to your success as an admin. One major component in ensuring your users have that access is Permission Set Assignments. But reporting on assignments has been a challenge, and we hear you! That’s why I’m excited to announce the User Access and Permissions Assistant.
Before we get into all of the awesome details about the User Access and Permissions Assistant, I want to give you a brief history of why reporting on permission assignment is not as simple as just opening up the permission assignment object to the Reports and Dashboards feature. Think about all of the ways a user can be assigned a permission: directly through a permission set, indirectly through a permission set group, on a profile (as a reminder, we still plan to end-of-life permissions on profiles), and by muting a permission(s) from a permission set group. Phew, that’s a lot of options for assigning permissions to users.
When I first joined Salesforce almost a year ago, I took the permission set assignment object and extracted it, put it in a custom object, and tried to get to the net of what a user has access to in standard reports. I realized I really couldn’t do it and it would be super complicated. And, as the product manager for this area, I didn’t feel right giving you something that wasn’t really going to solve your problem. We looked at our tech stack and noticed this Salesforce Labs app called Permission Helper. There were some reporting and analysis capabilities built in that we could use to start helping our customers report on and analyze their user access.
Now, let’s dive into what the User Access and Permissions Assistant does and what you can expect from it.
First, you’ll need the User Access and Permissions Assistant App. If you already have Permission Set Helper, then by the time you’re reading this you should have received an upgrade to the new app. If you didn’t have the app previously, you can download it here.
Once you install the app, you’ll need to run through a few setup steps which can be found here Even if you’ve had the app previously installed, you should take a look and make sure everything is set up correctly.
Once you’ve set up the app, navigate to App Launcher and search for User Access and Permissions Assistant.
Once you’re in the app, you’ll see there are four tabs that will allow you to do the following:
Analyzing, reporting, and managing permissions will become easier for you. You no longer have to export files and do a bunch of calculations on your own to understand a user’s access—the User Access and Permissions Assistant will make these tasks much simpler! This is just the start of what we plan to bring to you in this app. Watch the video below for a detailed overview on how the app will help you, our #AwesomeAdmins, manage and analyze permissions.
As a best practice, you should install the app first into a sandbox or Developer Edition org to try it out before using it in your production org. Here’s the link to the AppExchange listing.
If you have any feedback or want to discuss more, head on over to our Trailblazer Community Group.
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