Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Douane James, Salesforce Application Product Manager. Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation covering how reducing profiles in your org can enable faster deployments. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Douane James.

How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your org

Douane’s giving a talk at Dreamforce this year so I was excited to get him on the pod and hear more. He recently went through the process of reducing the number of profiles in his org from 11 down to only 2, so his talk is centered around why you can and should do the same.

I know I don’t need to tell you this, but Salesforce best practices change over time. Most Salesforce orgs are built to work right now, which is how you can wind up with technical debt. For example, permission sets have become a much more elegant solution to the problems we used to solve with profiles. Sounds like a big project, but Douane’s here to tell you that reducing the number of profiles in your org is not as hard as you might think.

Profile footprint reduction speeds up deployment

A few years ago, Douane’s organization started using a new dev ops process. And while this made it easier to identify what needed to be built and do it quickly, he couldn’t help but notice how long the deployments were taking. More often than not, the delays were related to configuring profiles. He realized they needed to do an overhaul and reduce the number of profiles in their org.

The first step was to get buy in. For Douane, the key was to emphasize how much quicker his team would be able to respond to requests if they spent time on cleaning up profiles. It also helped that they were committed to gradual improvements over time. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think if you go step by step.

How to move from profiles to permission set groups

Douane and his team set out to move everything they could from profiles into permission set groups. They identified a representative for each user role they could interview to make sure everything was still working as intended throughout the process.

When you’re looking at your existing profiles, you need to find out:

1. What are the permissions in the profiles?


2. What permissions are common to each job function?


3. Are there any special cases?

For users that need a lot of special access, Douane recommends creating a “heavy” permission set that allows you to give them exactly what they need.

If Douane has one message for you, it’s that the hardest part of reducing their Salesforce profiles was getting started. And the impact was felt immediately in terms of much quicker deployments and better security.

Make sure to catch Douane at Dreamforce and subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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• Trailhead Module: Permission Set Groups


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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking to Douane James, who presented at Dreamforce this year on the reduction of profiles that he helped manage for his organization, he went from 11 down to two, so profile reduction footprint, that’s pretty cool, and his journey to Salesforce. He is an intentional admin. He wanted to become a Salesforce admin because he saw the potential and how it aligned with his critical thinking and his business problem solving skills.

So we’re going to talk through how he reduced profiles and also kept permission sets and permission set groups from being bloated. This is an awesome conversation. Now, before we get started, just a reminder, if you love what you’re listening to, hey, drop a review on your favorite app. Be sure to click that follow or subscribe button. A lot of apps have that now.

The reason I ask you to do that is then a new episode just shows up right on your phone. You don’t have to think about it. Every Thursday morning you get a brand new Salesforce Admins Podcast. So when you wake up and you’re walking the dog or commuting to work or going for a bike ride, you’ve got something you didn’t even have to download it. Phone took care of it for you. So with that, let’s get Douane on the podcast. So Douane, welcome to the podcast.

Douane James:

Oh, great. Thank you for having me. This is awesome.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. Well, it is the last day of Dreamforce, and your session was incredibly popular talking about reducing profiles and adopting permission sets. So that’s my teaser. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get started as a Salesforce admin?

Douane James:

Yeah, it’s a story I always tell, and it’s that I got my start around the time when accidental admins was a thing. You would hear that a lot, “Oh, I’m an accidental admin,” and I would say I’m the opposite of an accidental admin. I got into Salesforce specifically to get into Salesforce. And it’s funny, because before I got into Salesforce, I used to work in the healthcare field, and I used to do different things in a community like recreational leagues. And I’d always have people…

You’d meet new people and would ask me, “Oh, what do you do?” And even before I could say anything, they would say, “Oh, you seem like you work in IT,” and I would say, “No, no, I don’t work in IT. I have nothing to do with IT.” But I kind of recognized, oh, I’m an analytical person and somebody keeps telling me this, maybe I should work in IT. I just happened to come across Salesforce.

This was about seven, eight years ago. And what appealed to me was I was able to get into it without having to go back into college. And I saw Trailhead, and I was actually able to follow those steps where I was a volunteer. After I got certified and I got my first contract, that led to a second contract, and then second contract position, and then that led to a full-time position.

And I’ve been able to really work my way up and now working in an organization as definitely a team lead Salesforce admin and just a mix of roles, business analyst, internal consultant, all these things where I’m just supporting the Salesforce platform and working with users on the regular.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah