A Salesforce Wave App for Comparing Permissions

Comparing user's permissions within the Salesforce platform has been a long standing request and non-trivial task for administrators. I wrote a blog post on Comparing Profiles and Permission Sets previously about this very topic, outlining some of the challenges reporting on user's access.

Since then, it's come up on social media a couple of times, most recently with a twitter post.

While apps like the Perm-Comparator from John Brock are still the go-to solution for comparing users, permission sets, and profiles, a thought occurred to me that you could also solve this BigData problem with the Salesforce Wave platform.

So I set out to use the tooling available via the Wave platform for creating a simple app that compares permission assignments and their containers. It is just a proof of concept but it can be a good starting point for admins who have access to the Wave platform already and want to compare user's permissions.

The reason to create this kind of dashboard is to explore both permission set assignments (which include profiles) to users as well as the underlying permission set and profile containers.

This is done by auto-generating datasets using the Wave dataset builder which is a point-and-click tool that accesses these objects via the Salesforce API.

The Wave platform is an incredible tool for exploring complex datasets and cuts through the complexity of users, permission sets, and profiles like a hot knife through butter. If you have the Wave platform already and would like to try this out after the Spring '16 release, check out my Github repository, permissionsWaveApp.