Environment Health and Optimisation
- Harry Mycock
- Jan Tenenberg
All clients under contract with Vertic receive at least monthly attention to the health and upkeep of their Salesforce environment. This ensures that all environments that we work on maintain the highest level of Salesforce’s out of the box Health Check Rating and remain aligned with the ever-evolving releases of Salesforce updates and enhancements. During this monthly allocation of time, we also run the Salesforce Optimiser Report and work with the clients to complete the recommended tasks to ensure all environments remain secure, clean and efficient.
By completing the above each month, Vertic maintain the highest standard of data security, by following Salesforce’s recommended steps and practices, as they are released.
See the below summary and outline of how we approach these tasks each month.
Health Check
This is the first step in the monthly process. Salesforce provides a list of risks and items that need attention in order to maintain a high level of security and system efficiency.
Typically all critical and high priority items are Security related, so these are the tasks that we action first and as they are raised.
Salesforce recommends a score of 80%+ Very Good. We aim to keep all of our environments above 90% Excellent .
More details about the Salesforce Health Check can be found here.
We will then provide feedback and before/after screenshots to the client of the work carried out and estimates of any further recommended work.
We will always action Health Checks in Sandbox environments first and test key processes and pages with the client before working in Production.
See below how we communicate our results to the client in this comment.
Release Updates
The next step in the monthly process is to review pending release updates in all environments. This typically required the most effort in the month leading up to a Salesforce release update.
Salesforce provides a list of actions required with due dates that align with the Salesforce releases in Sandbox and Production.
The most common theme to most Salesforce releases is enhanced security. This helps to prevent potential breaches by ensuring that only the necessary personnel has access to only what they need.
Below are examples of security enhancements Vertic have implemented on the back of Salesforce releases and recommendations:
Mandatory Multi-Factor-Authentication for all Salesforce users
Reduced Guest User Permissions
Reduced public access to site data
Reduced access to data shared in Email Templates
Tighter permission set guidelines resulting in a reduction of
Modify all dataRemoval of public access to objects
An example ticket and specification on our task managing software Jira can be seen below:
https://verticconsulting.atlassian.net/browse/KUCKJ-1190
We will complete all release updates in Sandbox the month before the due date and carry out testing on affected and critical processes before the client tests and approves a production release.
Salesforce Optimiser
The final step of our Health and Optimisation process is to run the Salesforce Optimiser report.
The Salesforce Optimiser is an out of the box diagnostic tool which provides a list of tasks in Priority order of Immediate Action Required, Action Required and Review Required. Similarly to Health Checks and Release updates, security enhancements are at the forefront of the Optimiser recommendations and are marked as the highest priority. This can include smaller tweaks to permission sets, sharing rules, and profile permissions to keep your data safe and access secure.
During the monthly allocation of time we will work with the client to prioritise and consult on the recommended tasks based on the priority given by Salesforce and the nature of the task.
Optimiser tasks also improve the day to day efficiency of the Salesforce environment and ensure a clean and secure environment with minimal obsolete data and processes.
All optimiser tasks follow our strict production process of Sandbox > Internal Testing > Client Testing > Production.
We manage these tickets in Jira using the parent/sub-task hierarchy. You can see an example below: