Salesforce Hidden Features

Salesforce come with tons of features for administrator to make their live easy. But, do you know if there is more features which is not enable by default. You need to contact Salesforce support to enable it.

Here are 10 features a consultant usually needed for Salesforce implementation:

1. Ability to update Created Date and Last Modify Date
This sound crazy? But yes, sometimes you need this when do initial data migration to Salesforce. It called to enable "Audit Fields", read this article Considerations before having Create Audit Fields enabled.

2. Extended Mail Merge
With Extended Mail Merge, you can easily generate mail merge Word documents without dependency on Internet Explorer, certain Windows version, and Microsoft Word version, read this article Generating Mass Mail Merge Documents with Extended Mail Merge.

3. Person Account
For B2C companies, not all of your customer is company, instead of linking all contacts to an Account, you can request to enable Person Account. Linking all contacts to an Account will cause data skew - read this Avoid Account Data Skew for Peak Performance

4. Remove Price and Quantity field from Opportunity Product
Rather than always put 1 to quantity, you can request Salesforce support to remove price and quantity from opportunity product page layout.

5. Upgrade file attachment size beyond 5 MB
By default, user allowed to upload file to attachment maximum 5 MB per file, but we can request to Salesforce support to extend this limit to 10 MB up to 25 MB.

6. Email Relay
We can request all email send out from Salesforce.com via our email server for audit or security purpose or etc, reach Salesforce support to can enable this feature.

7. Encrypted Field
Some confidential data, like credit card number; need to be protect. User should not able to see the information unless he is the person needed. With enabling encrypted field, admin can manage only some users able to view sensitive data, but be aware that encrypted field is not searchable and the data length is shorter.

8. Multi Currencies
Multi national companies will get most advantages once multi currency enabled. We can use it in opportunity, forecast in reports.

9. Sandboxes
Number and type of sandbox is depend on your Salesforce edition you purchased, but you can purchase additional sandboxes as needed.

10. Defer Sharing Calculations
Deferring sharing calculation is ideal if you make a large number of changes to roles, territories, groups, users, portal account ownership, or public groups participating in sharing rules, and want to suspend the automatic sharing calculation to a later time. Group membership and sharing rule calculation are enabled by default. Read this document Defer Sharing Calculations.