Setting up the users

To get more out of Salesforce, we have to allow our business users to access Salesforce. For this, a system administrator has to set up his or her user account. Before setting up a user account, the system administrator needs to gather basic information about users and their preferences to fill out a few mandatory fields. These fields are as follows:

• Last Name: This is the user's last name.
• Alias Name: Salesforce automatically creates an alias name for you. It is the combination of the first character of your first name and the last four characters of your last name.
• Email: This is the e-mail address of the user (it is used by Salesforce to send notifications).
• Username: This is in the format of an e-mail address.
• Nickname: This is used by Salesforce in the online community.
• User License: This is based upon the business requirement. Also, you can select the user license.
• Profile: This is dependent on the user license. When you select the user license, it will also give you the option to select corresponding profiles based upon that user license.
• Email Encoding: This will define a character set encoding for outbound e-mails sent by the user from Salesforce.
• Time Zone: This allows you to specify the user's local time zone.
• Locale: This allows you to define the locale for the user.
• Language: This lets you define the language in which the user wants to operate in Salesforce.
• Currency: This allows you to set the user's preferred currency.

  Note

  This Currency field will be visible only when multicurrency is enabled in your organization.

• Receive Approval Request Emails: This allows users to select when they want to receive e-mails for approval requests.

There are various ways to set up users in Salesforce. The following are the possible ways through which you can create users:

• User interface
• Data loader
• API call

To create a user from the user interface, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Manage Users | Users.
2. Click on New User.
   
3. It will open a new page where you have to enter all the required details, and then select Generate new password and tick the Notify the user immediately checkbox so that Salesforce can send an e-mail notification to the user with the link to activate his or her account and set up a new password.
4. Click on Save.
5. The user will be notified, as shown in the following screenshot, and can click on the user activation link to activate the account and move on to set the new password:
   

Adding multiple users

Sometimes it may be necessary to create several users, and if you try to create users one by one, it will take a long time. Here, you can use Salesforce's add multiple users feature. You can add up to 10 users at a time. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Manage Users | Users.
2. Click on Add Multiple Users.
3. It will redirect you to a new page where you have to select the User License type:
   
4. You will have to enter a few details such as the first name, last name, e-mail (user name), profile, and role as shown in the following screenshot:
   
5. Once done, select Generate passwords and notify user via email.
6. Click on Save.
7. You can add more users by clicking on the Add More Users button.

We will go into more detail about how to set up users through the data loader in Chapter 7, Concepts of Data Management.