Main Differences between Profiles and Permission Sets in Salesforce

For a user to be able to use Salesforce, it is mandatory to have a Profile. The field-level access permissions of a customer will be controlled by these profiles. There are two types of shapes, standard, and custom. We will list below how each one works.

Default Profiles: Salesforce provides these default settings profiles that cannot be deleted. They have these characteristics:

• Regular user;
• Read-only;
• Contract manager;
• Marketing user;
• System Administrator; and,
• Solutions Manager.

As listed, these standard profiles include a common set of permissions for virtually all everyday objects in the software.

Custom Profiles: the user can create, delete, or change these profiles according to his business needs. You can do this by following these step-by-step steps: Navigation, Settings, Administrator, Manage Users, and finally, Profiles.

Listed below are the permission controls that the Profiles have access to:

• Record Type Permission;
• Which applications can be viewed;
• Field permissions (view and edit);
• Classes, page permissions;
• The login time can be set;
• IP address permissions;
• Object permissions (create, delete, read, and edit permissions);
• Which page layouts can be viewed; and,
• Which tabs are visible.

User permission sets: these permission sets extend user access without changing user profiles. You can grant permission sets for various types of users, regardless of their profiles. You can assign extra permissions to a user. There are two alternatives for this:

1.  You are allowed to make changes to this user’s profile. However, allocating the same shape to a single user is optional. The profile can have several users who will know everything.
2. Creating a new permission set is an alternative to these extra permissions. Users are granted a specific set of rules by browsing the user’s details page. In this sense, you don’t need to stick to other users because a particular user will get the extra permissions.

After this brief explanation of profiles, user permission sets, and more, let’s explain some specific profile and permission set business functions in Salesforce.

The visibility of a user’s data is expanded through some Salesforce roles. This visibility can be increased according to the sharing models or building rules of the role hierarchy. This role hierarchy allows users at higher role levels to have access to records belonging to users at the level below them. 

It is optional to define roles for each user: consider that you have 4 sales team managers, and you need them to study other groups’ specifications. But, it would be best if you protected colleagues or team members from seeing any content outside the ownership of that specific group. So you would provide these managers with the role of “Sales Team Manager.” After that, you could separate the position of the customers into groups.

Role Hierarchy with Equal Access: It is permissible for you to configure that managers do not have access rights to any team.

Some Sharing Rules: By default, Salesforce sets the default access for objects. Only the owner of the record can access the history, for example. You can specify in custom objects whether these records can be shared using roles or hierarchies. Listed here are some specific rules on this topic:

• The role definition for the sales user is not mandatory;
• The role controls the level of access to the record that the user in Salesforce may have in the system; and,
• Records can be shared as long as there are appropriately written sharing rules. These shares are for specific subordinates.