Assign Permissions

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe the purpose of CRM Analytics permission set licenses and how to assign them.
View user permissions to determine what access a user has to CRM Analytics features.
Understand both the custom and quick processes for assigning permissions to users.

Setup CRM Analytics

The Developer Edition (DE) org provided for this trail takes care of this step for you. CRM Analytics is already enabled, so you don’t need to do anything. Your company’s production org displays a CRM Analytics button the first time you open CRM Analytics from the app menu. You click the button to enable CRM Analytics for your team when you begin the setup process. Since that’s already taken care of in the DE org, you can move to the next step.

Give Users Permission to Use CRM Analytics

This is where we cover the nitty-gritty of setting up user access to CRM Analytics. As the Salesforce admin for DTC, you ensure that all users have appropriate levels of access. For example, some users need view-only permissions, while others need permission to update dataflows or create apps.

Your users don’t see the CRM Analytics app until you assign them the right permission. After you purchase a CRM Analytics license, you can follow either the quick or custom process for assigning permissions. The quick process lets you assign a default permission set to users. It lets you get the job done quickly, but gives you less control.

The custom process takes more work but gives you fine-grained control over the permissions you assign. It involves these steps:

Assign CRM Analytics permission set licenses to your users.
Create a permission set that contains all the permissions your user needs, then assign the permission set to the user.

Your CRM Analytics-enabled DE org has two active users, you and Laura Garza. Let’s follow both the basic and custom processes for both users. First, let’s talk about permission set licenses, permission sets, and how to remember which does what.

Permission Set Licenses and Permission Sets: They're Different

”Permission set license” (PSL) is not only a mouthful, it’s also easy to confuse with “permission set”. But they are two different things; keep them distinct when you set up CRM Analytics.

If you follow the custom process, you first assign a permission set license to users. The PSL enables a set of user permissions in your org, but doesn’t assign them without you doing something first.

That “something” is to create a permission set. Select the permissions you want to assign from the specific permissions enabled by the PSL, and add them to the permission set. You then assign that permission set to users.

The quick process makes things much simpler: All you do is assign one of the prebuilt permission sets that come with a CRM Analytics platform license. (With basic permission assignment, you don’t have to be concerned about permission set licenses.)

If You Remember Nothing Else, Remember This

Here’s an analogy that can make things clear. A PSL is like a passport. It grants you the right to travel, but you can’t visit the great land of CRM Analytics without the right visa. A permission set is like a visa. You can get a 3-day tourist visa, a work visa, or a student visa. Each visa type lets you do certain things. Just like a traveler needs both a passport and a visa, your CRM Analytics users need at least one PSL and a permission set.

User Permissions Enabled by a CRM Analytics Permission Set License

The PSL determines which permissions you can assign to a user. You can only assign permissions that are included in that user’s PSL.

Your DE org includes the CRM Analytics Plus license which lets you assign a number of user permissions, including the following:

Create and Edit CRM Analytics Dashboards
Create CRM Analytics Apps
Edit CRM Analytics Dataflows
Manage CRM Analytics
Upload External Data to CRM Analytics
Use CRM Analytics

Some analytics apps have their own PSLs and associated user permissions. Any additional licenses and user permissions are documented in Salesforce Help.

Custom vs. Quick Permission Set Assignment

How do you know whether to follow the custom or quick setup processes? It’s a matter of control: If you need fine-grained control over what users can and can’t do with CRM Analytics, use custom. If you instead want to provide full permissions for users to access CRM Analytics features, use quick.

Most of the time, the quick option provides what you need. A CRM Analytics platform license includes two default permission sets, CRM Analytics Plus User and CRM Analytics Plus Admin. The user permission set includes permissions to help users get started, such as Use CRM Analytics. The admin permission set includes the broad range of user permissions needed to build a CRM Analytics solution.

Use the custom option when you need to carefully consider the level of CRM Analytics access required by members of your team. Perhaps some users need more than the simple permission to use CRM Analytics. They might need to import data, or create dashboards and apps. Or perhaps others need a more limited set of permissions than those granted by the default admin permission set. Remember, CRM Analytics dashboards, lenses, and datasets can contain sensitive information, and you may want to put some time thinking about which users can see what.

If all of this seems a little overwhelming, CRM Analytics provides guided steps for both processes. From Setup, enter Analytics in the Quick Find box, then select Getting Started.

Let’s take a quick look at how both processes work, starting with custom.

The names and labels described here may not match exactly the ones you see in your CRM Analytics-enabled Developer Edition org. However, the principles and techniques we take you through apply to any org you use.

From Setup, enter Users in the Quick Find box, then select Users.
Click your username.
The user details page appears. Scroll down to the Permission Set License Assignments section. Be sure to view the PSL section, not the Permission Set Assignments section. They’re easy to confuse!
Verify that the license assignment is correct. You should have the CRM Analytics permission set license (Analytics Platform). You may have other licenses in addition to these.
If you’re curious, click Edit Assignments to see what other licenses are available. Don’t make any changes, though. You need your current PSL so you can complete challenges in this module. Now let’s check on the other active user in this org, Laura Garza.
Repeat steps one to five, but this time click Laura Garza’s username, not yours.
View Laura’s PSL. It looks something like this: Laura’s permission set license assignment is fine. But Laura isn’t an admin, so she has limited access to CRM Analytics. The permission set associated with her PSL reflects her limited access. Let’s take a look.
Scroll up Laura’s user page to the Permission Set Assignments section.
Click the permission set assigned to Laura.
In the permission set page, scroll down to the System section and click System Permissions.

The System Permission page has a long list of permissions, almost all of which are unselected. If you scroll down, down, down, you see checks next to the Use CRM Analytics and Use CRM Analytics Templated Apps permissions.

As the description indicates, this is a view-only permission, so all is correct. Laura doesn’t have admin rights.

What if Laura or other users needed additional permissions? Here’s where you could take care of that. In your browser, search for CRM Analytics in the Permission Sets page. For most browsers, use the Command-F key combo, and enter analytics. Scroll through the page to see all the highlighted CRM Analytics permissions you could add to the Analytics Trailhead Explorer.

Or, you could create a new permission set.

Under Setup, click Permission Sets, then New.
Enter Example Permset in the label field.
Select the CRM Analytics Plus permission set license from the License menu, and click Save.
Click System Permissions.

You can see all the possible CRM Analytics user permissions. You could click Edit, choose the ones you want to add to the example permission set, then save it to create a custom permission set. You could then assign it to users.

You won’t do that here, since we don’t need to enable any new users. But this gives you the idea of how to use a custom permission set to give you granular control over a user’s access to CRM Analytics. Now take a quick look at the quick process.

Use Basic Permission Sets

You should still be in the Users area of Setup.

Click Users.
Click your username.
Just under your name, click Permission Set Assignments.
At the top of the page, under Permission Set Assignments, you can see that you’ve already been assigned permission sets. Click Edit Assignments.
At the top of the list, you can see the default permission sets that are included with a CRM Analytics platform license: CRM Analytics Plus Admin and CRM Analytics Plus User.
Have a look at the permissions included in each set. In the Setup panel at far left, right-click Permission Sets and open the link in a new window.
In the window you just opened, click CRM Analytics Plus Admin, then System Permissions to see the user permissions included in that permission set. Then click back twice and do the same thing for the CRM Analytics Plus User permission set.
Go back to the Permission Sets screen that should still be open in the first window (from Step 5). Now that you know what permissions the permission sets contain, select one of them and click the Add arrow to add it to Enabled Permission Sets list.

If you clicked Save, you’d have assigned yourself that permission set along with its permissions. That also automatically assigns you a permission set license, saving you that step. You could follow the same process to assign a default permission set to other users in your org. Much simpler, right? And you still have some control over what users get access to which CRM Analytics features.

CRM Analytics gives you choice over how to assign permissions to members of your team. You can enable other features to enhance their CRM Analytics experience. We’ll look at how to do that next.

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