Language settings and its importance

As Salesforce is being used across the globe and we all use different languages to communicate, Salesforce supports multiple languages. The Salesforce web user interface, Salesforce for Outlook, Connect for Outlook, Connect Offline, and Connect for Office are all available in various languages.

The Salesforce web user interface supports two language settings.

Personal settings

Let's start with an example. Robby Williams is a new hire from Russia. The default organization language is set to English, which means all the text and online help are displayed to all the new users in English. Robby Williams would like to change his complete user interface to Russian.

Users can change the default language to their local language to display the Salesforce text, images, buttons, and online help.

To change to your personal language, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Name | My Setting | Personal | Language & Time zone.
2. Then, select the language from the Language drop-down list:

You can find more information about the language Salesforce supports as the standard language in the information box.

Note

If you are not able to find your preferred language, then contact your system administrator to enable it. In the preceding example, the system administrator enabled the English, Deutsch, Español, François, and Italiano languages for the organization so that users can get these options under the Language drop-down list.

Organization's default language settings

A system administrator can enable multiple languages for your Salesforce organization. This means users have the option to select their preferred language from the available list.

Salesforce offers three levels of language support, as follows:

• Fully supported languages
• End user languages
• Platform-only languages

Fully supported languages

Fully supported languages, such as Thai, Russian, English, or Danish, are the ones where the user functionality and help pages in the application are completely translated into these languages.

Note

The fully-supported languages list includes Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai. Even though the Salesforce interface is completely translated to Thai, the help page remains in English.

End user languages

End user languages are useful when you are working in a multilingual organization where you speak a language that is different than your headquarters. End user languages are used by users who would like to access the app in that language, but do not want to access the Setup menu.

Let's start with an example. A company has its headquarters in a French-speaking country, but that company has non-admin employees in other countries that would prefer to use the app in a language supported as an EUL. As they do not want to access the Setup menu and help pages, the EUL settings provide sufficient translations out of the box to suit their needs.

Note

The end user languages list includes Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, English (U.K.), Greek, Spanish (Mexico), Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Enabling an end user language

To enable an end user language for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Company Profile | Language Settings.
2. From the Language Preferences section, select the Enable End User Languages checkbox to enable it:
   
3. Then, it will add all the end user languages to the available language multi-select picklist.
4. Click on Save.

Platform-only languages

Platform-only languages are used to localize the custom functionality (apps) built on the Salesforce Platform. The platform-only languages allow organizations to provide their own translations via the translation workbench for languages that Salesforce doesn't provide any translations for.

Note

The platform-only languages list includes Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Bosnian, Croatian, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (India), English (Malaysia), English (Philippines), Estonian, French (Canada), Georgian, Hindi, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Portuguese (European), Romansh, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Urdu, and Welsh.

Enabling the platform-only languages

To enable the platform-only languages for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Company Profile | Language Settings.
2. From Language Preferences, select Enable Platform Only Languages:
   
3. This will add all the end user languages to the available language multi-select picklist.
4. Click on Save.

Once you enable the platform-only language, Salesforce will enable the end user language automatically.

Note

What happens when the system administrator changes the organization's default language from English to Russian if the user's personal language preference is already set as Russian?

The user will still see Salesforce in Russian. If a personal preference is not set, then Salesforce will automatically change everything from English to Russian.

The significance of roles and profiles

In this section, we will discuss roles, profiles, and their significance in Salesforce.

Significance of the role hierarchy

By using roles in Salesforce, you can control the data/records access and organization reports. In simpler terms, you can use it to control record-level access in Salesforce. It describes how roles connect to each other. It may or may not be similar to your organization hierarchy. A role can have one, more than one, or even no users assigned to it. It is a good practice to ensure that every user is assigned a role when first added to the system.

The users who are higher in the role hierarchy will be able to see the records of people below them. Users who share the same role or are at the same level (VP Sales and VP Marketing) cannot access each other's records:

In the preceding image, the CEO can see all the organization records as they are at the top of the role hierarchy. At the same time, VP Sales and VP Marketing can't see each other's records even though both are at the same level, but VP Sales can access Sales Reps records and VP Marketing can access Marketing Agents records. Sales Reps and Marketing Agents can see only their records as these roles are lower in the role hierarchy. Users at any given role level can view, edit, and report all the data owned by or shared with users below them in the role hierarchy.

Note

In the preceding example, it is assumed that Organization-Wide Default (OWD) is private for objects. We will discuss more about OWD in Chapter 3, Make your Salesforce Data Secure – Security Settings in Salesforce.

Creating the role hierarchy for your organization

To create the role hierarchy for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Manage Users | Roles.
2. Click on Set up Roles to go to the Creating the Role Hierarchy page:
   
3. Click on Add Role to create a new role:
   
4. It will redirect us to a new page, where we have to enter details in a few fields to create the new role:
   • Label: This will be displayed in the user interface
   • Role Name: This unique name will be used by the API and packages managed
   • This role reports to: This is the role above a specific role in the hierarchy (like in case of VP Sales – the value in this field would be CEO)
   • Role Name as displayed on reports: This is the role name that appears on reports
   • Opportunity Access: This field describes whether users can access other user's opportunities, which are associated with accounts that the users own

   This field is not visible if your organization's sharing model for opportunities is public read/write:

   
5. Click on Save.

Repeat the preceding process and create the organization role hierarchy. You can create the same role hierarchy we used to describe the role hierarchy under the Role Hierarchy topic. Finally, it will look like the following screenshot:

Note

Whenever you want to delete any role, make sure that you start the deletion from its child roles. If users do not have any role assigned to their user record, they can only view their own records.