Licensing

Like in most applications, every data story begins with a user: they authenticate against the application, they are recognized by their credentials and profile (we're not talking about Salesforce profiles but the generic set of powers a specific kind of user has), and then they are allowed to access the application's features and a subset of the data.

A Salesforce user is identified by their license. The User License field is one of the mandatory fields of the Salesforce user object:

The available licenses can be found in Setup | Company Settings | Company Information, in the User Licenses section:

The number and type of available licenses you have depends on what your company or your customer has agreed to with Salesforce.

We can reasonably divide licenses into three groups regarding data sharing:

• Full sharing model usage users/licenses: Users within this category have full access to the Salesforce sharing system. Some objects may not be accessible (for example, the free edition cannot access base CRM objects), but the engine is still there and configurable. This class of users is usually referred to as internal users.
• High volume customer portal licenses: Users within this category do not have access to the sharing model. Instead, sharing is enabled by matching user fields with other object's relations (for example, the contact lookup on the user is used to provide access to cases with the same contact value). This class of users is generally used in Salesforce communities.
• Chatter-free license: This category doesn't have access to the sharing model or any CRM object (standard or custom) and it features collaboration-only access (chatter, groups, and people, to name a few).

In a few words, the license constrains the kind of powers a user has, which is then delivered with profiles and permission sets. We'll take a look at these in the upcoming sections.