Foreword

When I started working on Salesforce in 2008, I had no idea where Salesforce is heading. After Apex and Visualforce, Chatter was a big hit and a much needed product of Salesforce. After Chatter, Salesforce started delivering big features and products, such as Salesforce1, Tooling API, Process Builder, Visual Flow, Platform Encryption, Wave, and Lightning, one after another, to name few. Since the Salesforce ecosystem became vast with each release, sometimes, it's hard for the beginners to find a starting point with the latest information. There are many features in Salesforce that get enhanced with each release, resulting in the existing content on the evangelist's websites becoming obsolete or outdated.

Mastering Salesforce CRM Administration would help Salesforce professionals and newbies to learn many features available in Salesforce. Rakesh has done a fantabulous job in writing and tailoring content and group them in logical chapters.

The first chapter talks about enabling Lightning experience, Salesforce editions, objects, and the type of relationships. This chapter will give a firm start to all new professionals who want to start careers in Salesforce. The next chapter goes deeper into the important topics of security by talking about organization-wide defaults, sharing rules, roles, profiles, and field-level security. It also explains multicurrency. The following chapter focuses on the territory management concept and the steps to enable it.

The next chapter leaves no stone unturned to make you an awesome admin by explaining the micro-level details of custom objects, fields, tabs, Lightning applications, Lightning record pages, and so on. It also explains the tools to improve the data quality of Salesforce, such as validation rule, duplicate management, and more.

There are dedicated chapters for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. If you ask me, even the whole book will not be sufficient enough to cover Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. However, the author has written the content brilliantly in order to cover as many concepts as possible at a high level so that you would not have any difficulty in exploring them in detail later. The next chapter focuses on complete e-mail management stuff such as e-mail deliverability and e-mail to case. It also covers mobile applications offered by Salesforce, such as SalesforceA, Authenticator app, and Salesforce1.

The author is a well-known blogger for Visual flow globally, and this book has a complete chapter on it. This book has a solid punch of basics to start with flow. I will say this chapter is a trump card for all professionals who want to master Visual flow.

The author doesn't want you to stop at being an awesome admin. He has a bigger plan, and to motivate all awesome admins, he has a short and sweet chapter on getting started with Apex and Visualforce.

One of the inimitable features of this book is the knowledge check at the end of every chapter. It will make sure that you understood the concepts well and will help in summarizing the content.

I hope this book will prove to be a springboard to start a career in Salesforce for many professional. After writing many books, Rakesh has a natural talent at keeping you engaged and entertained in every chapter. I promise that you will enjoy this book.

Jitendra Zaa

Salesforce MVP and Technical Architect