30 January 2013

Mass edit profiles using Enhanced Profile List Views




In an earlier blog, I discussed the importance of naming and using a profile's description.  What I find talking with admins is that they really need a way to compare and surface more of a profile in order to make informed decisions as well as updates.  To help this process of better managing a set of profiles, we created the Enhanced Profile List Views.

Enhanced Profile List Views enable you to:
Create custom list views of your profiles that give you visibility to the permissions of those profiles
Display profile information including user and object permissions
Print those list views in order to document your permissions
Mass Update your profile's user and object permissions
The last point is pretty important since each time you navigate to the profile screen and make a single change, you have to make approximately seven clicks. By using preconfigured list views, the number of clicks reduces to five, but more importantly, those five make changes across up to 200 profiles at a time.  As a result, you can make mass changes more quickly and have full audibility of those changes in the Setup Audit Trail for compliance and troubleshooting purposes.

HOW TO ENABLE

Enhanced Profile List Views may be enabled for all Enterprise and Unlimited Edition orgs.  To enable it, go to Setup | App Setup | Customize | User Interface and select Enable Enhanced Profile List Views.

HOW TO USE IT

Once you've turned it on, just go to your profile list under Setup  | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Profiles.  This enhanced list view works the same as any normal object enhanced list view with one exception, when you mass update a permission, we'll tell you what else will be changed. That way, you always know the impact of your decisions.  Don't worry if you miss this,  you can always check the audit trail afterwards to see what else was also updated.



To Print a list view:


I'm often asked when we will add more controls like tabs or record types to the list views. Those are all on our roadmap; however, when we talked with our admins, we found that the majority of mass updates needed were around two things: user and object permissions.  There are also some user interfaces already to manage some of the other controls, for instance the page layout - record type assignment matrix or the field accessibility user interface to manage page layout and field level security properties.  But if you feel strongly about specific controls being added to the list view, please add comments and your vote to the idea on the ideaexchange: Easier (faster) way to set profile permissions.

I was speaking with an admin just the other day that had spent the better part of the day manually updating profiles to remove a permission from all of them.  After we discussed the Enhanced Profile List Views, his day long task turned into a two minute long task allowing him to join his colleagues at a happy hour.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.