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Prepare Your Org for External Identity

Learning Objectives

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:
  • Configure a custom profile and role for external identity.
  • Assign the external identity role to a user.
  • Create an account to store your external identity users’ information.

Let’s Get Going

The first step to debuting external identity is to set the stage. Here’s what it takes.
  • A subdomain created with the My Domain Identity product.
  • A cloned external identity profile and role.
  • A user assigned to the external identity role.
  • An account.

My Domain Is Already On in Your Trailhead Playground

Do not attempt to turn on My Domain, or change its settings, in your Trailhead Playground. By default, My Domain is already set up in every Trailhead Playground.

External identity requires that the org is set up with a subdomain created with My Domain. You can tell that an org has a subdomain by looking at its URL. With My Domain, the instance URL that Salesforce assigns you, such as https://na17.lightning.force.com, is replaced with your chosen subdomain name, for example, https://MyCompanyName.lightning.force.com. MyCompanyName is a subdomain within the Salesforce Lightning domain.

Several Salesforce features, including custom Lightning components and single sign-on (SSO), require a My Domain subdomain. To make it easy, we’ve created a subdomain for your Trailhead Playground. Here you can see that playful-moose-388230-dev-ed is a subdomain of the lightning.force.com domain.

My Domain name highlighted in a Trailhead Playground URL

In your production org, you can create a subdomain with My Domain and choose its name, for example, to reflect your brand. To learn how to set up a subdomain in your production org, see the User Authentication module.

To learn more about My Domain and your Trailhead playground, check out this knowledge article.

Set Up a Simple Org

To demo external identity, let’s set up a simple org for customers to access. External identity requires an External Identity User profile, a role, and an account to contain your customers’ information. It also requires a Salesforce community, which is covered in the next unit.

Set Up a Profile for Your Customers

A profile is a collection of settings and permissions that determine what users can access after logging in to Salesforce. Use settings to specify what users can see, such as the types of records. Use permissions to manage what users can do, such as what apps they can access.

Salesforce includes a default External Identity User profile. You clone this profile and name it Customers. Later on, when visitors register for your community, they’re assigned the Customers profile.

To set up your own version of the profile, first clone the External Identity User profile.

  1. From Setup, enter Profiles in the Quick Find box, then select Profiles.
  2. Next to External Identity User, select Clone.
  3. Name the profile Customers, and click Save.

For now, let’s keep the defaults.

Add a Role

You create a customer community in the next unit. But first, you must create a role for the person who manages the community. So let’s set up a Customer Manager role and add it to the role hierarchy.

  1. From Setup, enter Role in the Quick Find box, then select Roles.
  2. From the dropdown list, select Product-based Sample, then select Set Up Roles. It’s at the bottom of the page.
  3. Under CEO, click Add Role.
  4. For the role label, enter Customer Manager.
  5. Click Save.

Assign the Role to a User

  1. From Setup, enter Users in the Quick Find box, then select Users.
  2. Next to your username, click Edit.
  3. Under Role, select Customer Manager.
  4. Click Save.

Create an Account

  1. From the App Launcher (App Launcher icon), find and select Accounts.
  2. Click New.
  3. Name the account Customers, and click Save.

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