Extending Salesforce across the organisation using Salesforce Platform licenses

Salesforce is a flexible and powerful cloud platform with support for a broad range of business functions and so offers a wide scope for digital transformation within an organisation.

A significant but often overlooked element of the platform which enables this wide scope is the Platform license capability. This provides a lower cost user license to access core application building elements of the Salesforce platform while restricting access to the fundamental Opportunity processes from which the Salesforce platform originated and evolved.

This can be ideal for system users who do not require access to Salesforce Opportunities but who want to manage processes within Salesforce which may be a preliminary to the opportunity process such as product development or proposition management, or an area of the business following the opportunity close such as service delivery. Or it could be something totally separate from line of business processes such as an HR recruiting application.

Benefits of the platform license approach is that it provides access to Salesforce’s secure cloud platform with all the automation processes provided, and a single repository for the core data which drives your organisation, at a fraction of the cost of a full Enterprise license.

The figure below shows the current UK list prices for Salesforce Sales Cloud licenses.

An Enterprise license is priced at ￡120/month and is the typical Sales Cloud user license.

In contrast we can see below the current UK list prices for Salesforce Platform licenses.

So Platform Starter is priced at ￡20/month which gives access to up to 10 custom objects [Platform Plus gives access to 110 custom objects]

If we look at the Salesforce profile for a Platform license user we can see access permissions to Accounts, Contacts and custom objects but access to Opportunity and related objects such as Orders is not available.

Building a custom app for a Platform license user would typically involve developing custom objects along with associated automations to perform one or more business processes. These processes can also involve access to the Account and Contact records held within Salesforce in these standard objects. Salesforce reporting functions are fully available on these custom objects providing the power of Salesforce reports. And full Salesforce security is provided by profiles and record sharing mechanisms which are part of the standard Salesforce platform.

We can demonstrate how this could work by taking a look at an example custom app for an education institute using Salesforce Platform licenses in addition to Enterprise licenses. In this scenario we have an organisation which delivers education and training courses to businesses or individuals. The sales team within the organisation are tasked with selling enrolment to the courses and will work with Salesforce Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities as they go through the sales process. The courses available will be represented in Salesforce by custom objects and records which can be linked to the associated Opportunity records created by the sales team.

Each Course will have a record, along with associated records for each intake for the course. For each intake there will be a number of related module records representing the curriculum of the course.

This data model is shown in the figure below.

An opportunity is created against a specific prospective student contact record and linked to the relevant course intake record the student is interested in. The sales team will then progress that opportunity and update the opportunity record as the discussions with the student continues and in line with the sale process.

An example app used by the sales team is shown below and gives access to Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities plus relevant custom objects shown on the app tabs. Opportunities can be tracked against each Intake record.

When a student has signed up to a specific course intake a separate intake enrolled student record is created linking the contact record directly to the intake record. This can be simply automated using a Salesforce Flow. [Automation options will be covered in a later article]. The Intake record is then used by the course administration department to manage the student enrolment process including creating additional records for specific module enrolments for each student. Student progression through the course and the associated modules can then be managed using these Salesforce custom objects and any required automations. This can extend to as many processes as required such as tracking course attendance, exam results, pastoral information, and on to potential alumni services. Access to the original Opportunity record is not required for these functions and so is a perfect fit with Platform licenses.

The app used by the course admin team could look something like below with access to the relevant objects shown on the tabs.

From the above we can see how a suitably designed Salesforce solution can offer support for a wide variety of processes across an organisation by combining Enterprise licenses complemented by lower cost Platform licenses. Extending Salesforce to additional processes offers organisations a great opportunity to build a single view of their customers, aka customer 360, helping them understand their customers better and so improve the propositions and services to the customer base.

Colin Campbell is a Salesforce Solution Architect and Consultant and has worked on over 30 Salesforce projects.