In this episode of ShellBlack Whiteboard we discuss what is an “App” in Salesforce – which is simply a collection of tabs that are assigned to users through their Profile. Shell walks through how to create a custom App in “Setup” and add a custom logo. Lastly Shell covers how licenses and Salesforce editions come into play in determining how many custom Apps are available to your Salesforce users.
View this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9ifbn7lu7aQ
Transcript of video:
Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of Shellblack Whiteboard, where we help you get the most out of the Salesforce platform. I’m Shell Black, president and founder of ShellBlack.com and Salesforce MVP. In this episode, we’re going to talk about making a custom “App.” So let’s get to it.
So a custom app is really nothing more than a collection of tabs and where this becomes important is as you grow in the Salesforce platform, you end up having a lot of tabs. You have all of your standard tabs: Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, whatever it might be. But then you also might have a bunch of custom tabs as well for your custom objects. And your users, you really want to tailor that experience for your users so they’re only seeing the tabs that are pertinent to their job role. So your back office people are only seeing tabs for their job role. Your sales people only a seeing tabs for their job role, kind of reducing the noise on the page.
On this row, I’ve kind of labeled out a bunch of tabs: Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Campaigns, Cases, custom object number one and custom object number two. And the colored lines below that are supposed to represent which tabs are associated to our custom apps. Again, a custom app is simply a collection of tabs that you’re kind of grouping together to present to your users.
So our red lines are for tabs that are included in our sales app. Our green lines are underlining the tabs that are available in my marketing app. Blue: accounts, contacts and cases, are the tabs available for my support and the purple: account, contact, custom object number one, custom object number two, are available in my back office app.
So how do we get these apps created in Salesforce? In Setup, you’re going to go into App Setup > Create Apps > Click “New App.” You’re going to have the ability to give it a name and a description. What also is kind of cool is you get to give it a logo. So if you don’t want the Salesforce edition: Spring, Winter, Summer, on the top left corner, you can pick a custom app logo. So you might have a different logo for your sales app and a different logo for your marketing app, different logo for your back office app. Just keep in mind when you add a logo, it has to be a GIF or a JPEG. The height and width, it’s 55 high by 300 pixels wide. It’s got to be fairly small and lightweight, 20K in size and you store that image in your Document Folder.
So how do you assign apps to your users? You do it by their profiles. So if you have a sales profile, you may want them to have access to the sales app. You might have some super users whose profile, like a system administrator or maybe a VP of Sales or a VP, to have access to multiple apps. So on a given profile, you can have one or many apps assigned to that profile. For some license restrictions, we’ll talk about that here in a sec. If a user has access to more than one app in their profile, they’ll be able to choose those apps that they have available to them. On the top right corner, there’ll be a pull down where they can select an app. So a system administrator might have access to all these apps. They can flip through these groupings of tabs by making a selection up at the top right.
The limitations are really by edition and what license type you have. So you can have up to five custom apps or five groupings of tabs for your users in Professional Edition. EE is my abbreviation for Enterprise Edition. You can have up to 10. Unlimited or Performance Edition, as many as you want, Developer: 10. And if you have something like a Force.com: “One App,” not surprising, you get to have one app for users with that license type.
So that’s it! That wraps up our discussion on about making a custom app in Salesforce. We’d love to hear your feedback of how we’re doing. If you have any comments for us, you can reach out to us two different ways. You can hit me on Twitter. I’m at @Shell_Black or you can email me at whiteboard@shellblack.com. Thanks again so much for tuning in. We hope that you watch another episode soon.