Chapter 2. Managing Data in Salesforce.com

Data management plays an important role in implementing and maintaining a successful adoption of Salesforce.com in an organization. Using Salesforce reporting and dashboards, you can easily analyze the data stored in most objects. Therefore, bad data will produce a bad result, and the report generated will not be of any use. For this reason, it is very important for you to keep your data clean, complete, and reliable.

In this chapter we will be covering data management in Salesforce, starting with a brief introduction to data backup in Salesforce, how to back up, and why backup is needed. Then we will continue with Sandbox, the types of Sandboxes, and Sandbox refreshing.

Data import is another interesting topic in Salesforce. It shows how we can bring external data into Salesforce regularly or on demand. We will end this chapter with data visibility and accessibility in Salesforce.

Throughout this chapter, we will provide notes and tips to help you understand important items. The topics covered here are:

Much of this chapter is intended for system administrators who need to maintain data in Salesforce. Business users will definitely benefit from understanding how to manage data, the Sandbox environment, and the concepts of data visibility and accessibility in Salesforce.