Easily analyze your org’s usage, identify and remove technical debt, perform impact analyses, and enable admins to create detailed documentation for better team collaboration.
Highlights
- Native to Salesforce with an intuitive and familiar user interface.
- Detailed org analysis, diving deep into profiles, permission sets, field usage, and more.
- Identify technical debt and make a plan to remove it safely.
- Create documentation directly within Salesforce quickly and easily.
Imagine youâre a Salesforce Administrator and you have just joined a new company to manage their Salesforce environment. You will want to get to know everything about your new org right away, but this process is often tedious and borderline impossible using Salesforce alone. You could easily spend months combing through the org, looking at the existing setup and reading any documentation available. But how efficient is this?
oAtlas is like an encyclopedia for your specific Salesforce environment. It can tell you everything you need to know about object/field usage, the security setup, documentation for new features, and more â all in an instant.
This doesnât just apply to new admins taking on new Salesforce orgs either. Existing admins managing Salesforce orgs could also benefit from a tool such as oAtlas. Speaking from my own experience, even after only having Salesforce for less than a year, our org has grown dramatically over that time and with multiple admins making changes based on user requirements, I could use an encyclopedia for my own org!
Features
As a native Salesforce application, oAtlas is designed to enhance understanding, documentation, and reporting of Salesforce org structures. You can facilitate quick, in-depth org analysis and improve the scalability and management of your Salesforce projects.
In this section, weâll dive deeper into the features that make oAtlas a must-have tool for any Salesforce Admin.
In-Depth Org Analysis
Navigating Salesforce can feel like trying to solve a complex puzzle â except the puzzle was started long before you arrived and youâre missing a few pieces. You could spend days (or even months) trying to piece it together.
Whether it’s understanding an old automation or setting up a new feature, admins often find out very late in the process that a solution has unexpected consequences. And this can often result in wasting countless hours developing a solution that needs complete re-working â not only consuming the adminâs time but impacting the end-users as well.
oAtlas is like a high-powered drone, offering a bird’s-eye view of your Salesforce landscape. It cuts through the complexity, giving Salesforce admins a clear, detailed map of how the org is constructed and used. Imagine how youâd feel if you could discover a faster, more efficient route when you’re stuck in traffic. With oAtlas, admins can pinpoint where improvements are needed, streamline workflows, and ensure they are delivering the requirements needed to achieve their organizationâs goals.
Before you even start gathering requirements for a new project, oAtlas is there to help identify the best way to achieve success. Imagine you want to do a huge overhaul of profiles and permission sets. Manually comparing every single profile to every single permission set in your org would easily take months. With oAtlas, you can see the differences and similarities with the click of a button, making it easy to understand how to consolidate or split out permissions to users.
Or imagine a user has asked you to change a fieldâs picklist value from âWidget Xâ to âWidget Y2â because a newer version of a product was released. Making the change is simple enough, just go into the field and make the update. But, do you truly know everywhere that this field is referenced? You could use the âWhere is this field usedâ button in Setup, but this misses many areas of the org and does not work at all on Standard fields.
With oAtlas, you can drill down into the field and see EVERYWHERE itâs referenced in the system, and see how itâs being used (even see the lines of custom code where itâs referenced in Apex Classes). This âImpact Analysisâ works on both Standard and Custom fields in your org.
oAtlas empowers admins to quickly get a detailed view of any part of their org, and design solutions with confidence ensuring no update or change will break something. Simply put, it allows admins to get answers quickly and make updates / build new features with accuracy and speed.
Easy Project Management & Documentation
There are so many tools out there for project management, but what oAtlas brings to the table is that itâs native to Salesforce. Tools like Atlassian cloud (JIRA, Confluence, Trello, etc.) are great for big enterprise orgs and large-scale projects, but they can be overkill for smaller system builds, such as a new field, flow, or permission set. With oAtlas, your documentation is right INSIDE your org and itâs easy to use.
Admins can prioritize and schedule their builds and releases from within Salesforce. They can create the items they need to build, add a start date, lead sponsor/stakeholder, and even create further custom fields such as priority, dependencies to other system builds, etc.
There is functionality to let users submit ideas for new features, and then use Chatter to get more information about the request. You can also estimate the cost/hours if youâre using an external resource, allowing you to sum up the price of the new features at the end of a period.
Since itâs native to Salesforce, to manage releases, you could create a custom object where you track âpackagesâ of features that you release at once. This helps you when it comes to testing each feature, ensuring documentation has been created ahead of time, and alerting users to anything that may affect their user experience.
Being able to manage new feature requests in a simple way is crucial for Salesforce Admins, as theyâre often drowning in unmanaged requests.
And, project management is great, but what about once all of those requests are built outâŚ
If you asked 100 Salesforce Admins if they wrote documentation for every single new feature they built, Iâm confident 90 or more of them would say no. Itâs simply not feasible. Most admins have a never-ending task list coupled with business users who are demanding new features day in and day out. Documentation is the last thing on their to-do list. I say this because I have experienced it myself.
With oAtlas, documentation has never been easier. The tool enables admins to write quick and easy documentation related to each feature in the system. You will never again look at a field and think âwhy did I create this?â or âwhat business process does this support again?â â weâve all been there before!
Every part of your org in oAtlas (fields, objects, flows, etcâŚ) has a System Documentations related list, just click ânewâ to add a new documentation tied to that part of the org. It really is that easy. Now anytime you come back to that field, or a different admin does, youâll know why this field was created and what project it was for.
With it being so easy to create documentation, there is no excuse not to have any, right?
Usage Statistics
How often have you looked at fields on a page layout and thought to yourself, does anyone even use these fields? While itâs possible to do this analysis outside of Salesforce, itâs time-consuming and likely not something any admin would choose to do on a regular basis.
But not doing it also means admins arenât looking for ways to make the user experience better or more efficient, and this can result in unhappy end users.
oAtlas not only shows the field usage, but it can also show admins when fields were last filled in (based on when the record was created). For example, you might have a field that looks like it has a high percentage of use, but in reality, it was a field brought over as part of a data migration and it hasnât been used in the last six months. This signals that the field is ripe for deprecation, or possibly needs a new process to capture that information if itâs relevant and/or valuable.
In the below example, Iâve been able to very quickly look at Opportunity fields that have been filled in 50% of the time or less in the last six months.
The âNextStepsâ and âOpportunity_Notes_câ fields are filled in very rarely, indicating that maybe the fields arenât prominent enough on the Lightning Record Page or that they should be required at a certain stage in the sales process.
Another insight from this list shows that âLeadSourceâ is hardly ever filled in, meaning the marketing team wonât have any idea what campaigns or tactics are working to get Opportunities. This could result in money being wasted on campaigns or events that donât bring good quality Leads.
Without oAtlas, I would have had to export all Opportunities and run some complicated formulas in Excel to see the rate of cells that had a value versus blank values. I also wouldnât have been able to look at the time frame in which the fields had been filled in either.
The complete timeframes that oAtlas looks at for âFilled Rateâ is Last 30 days, Last 60 Days, Last 90 days, Last 6 months, Last 1 year, Last 5 years, and All Time. So no matter what kind of field/object usage statistics you are looking for, oAtlas has them out of the box.
Comprehensive Reporting
No tool is complete without having custom reports, and oAtlas is no different. The package comes pre-loaded with several different reports that will help you to get to know your org.
Because the oAtlas records actually live in your org, you can report on previously unreportable parts of your org setup. For example, you can report on the sharing criteria of a sharing rule, all users and their group memberships, and report on Profiles and Permission Sets (a long-running wish of admins).
Because the tool is native to Salesforce, you can create your own reports based on any metric you like. Some good examples might be:
- All mission-critical fields on the Opportunity object that have been filled in less than 75% of the time over the last year.
- All Profiles and their login hours and IP ranges.
- The criteria for all sharing rules on the Account object.
- All Documentations tied to all Flows on the Case object and what Project they belong to.
You may already have a monitoring dashboard set up for regular monitoring, but adding reports connected to oAtlas components can elevate your dashboard, making it your go-to space for complete org management.
Use Cases
Now that we know about some of the features oAtlas has to offer, letâs look at how we can apply them to actual use cases.
Compliance Audits & Permission Management
Most Salesforce Admins will have had to complete at least one compliance audit in their time. This is common for larger organizations that have strict auditing requirements across their departments, but it can be extremely tedious.
Imagine having to go through each and every profile and permission set/permission set group to be able to define what different users have access to across the org. I have personally had to do this process manually and it took over four months to complete. oAtlas enables the entire process to happen painlessly!
Just go into the report folder that comes with the app and you can download âAll Permissionsâ in one go. Export it to Excel (or Tableau) and slice and dice all of the org permissions in any way you need for your audit. From weeks or months, down to just a few minutes.
For daily tasks around managing user permissions, in the âCompare Permissionsâ tab you can easily see the similarities and/or differences between any combination of things â such as permission sets versus permission sets, permissions versus profiles, permission set groups versus profiles, user versus user, and more.
In the below example, I am looking specifically at the differences between the âSales Userâ profile and the âStandard Userâ profile.
This is a game changer when troubleshooting user issues as well. How many times has a user said to you âI canât see the same fields as X?â which then forces you to analyze their permissions against another user in minute detail. With oAtlas, you can simply compare the two users and view the differences between them to remedy the issue effortlessly.
Detect and Rectify Technical Debt
Technical debt is a phrase that is widely used not only in the Salesforce community but in wider development communities too. It refers to the concept of choosing an easier, quicker, or more cost-effective solution in favor of the ideal technical solution. Just like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest, meaning the longer it goes unaddressed, the more time, effort, and resources it will require to fix in the future.
Technical debt can arise from various practices, such as writing code that is not scalable, skipping documentation, or foregoing comprehensive testing. It’s not always negative; sometimes taking on technical debt is a strategic decision to achieve short-term goals with the understanding that it will need to be addressed later. However, excessive or unmanaged technical debt can significantly hinder a systemâs long-term viability, making it crucial for development teams to regularly assess and address their technical debt to ensure the sustainability of their software projects.
We talked about the usage statistics earlier in the article, and these are one way of detecting technical debt in the system. But beyond this, oAtlas has several ways to help you identify technical debt. One is that many of the standard list views that ship with the app are designed to identify tech debt. For example, if you look at the screenshot above, the app has a drop-down for âRoles with no active usersâ. You can start with this âlow-hangingâ fruit, dig into the details with oAtlas, and come up with a plan for removal.
Additionally, the before-mentioned âCompare Permissionsâ tab is great for consolidating Profiles and Permission Sets. All admins know how annoying it can be to manage an unnecessary amount of Profiles.
Technical debt doesnât always directly impact users, but it can affect things like page load times and rolling out new features, so by detecting and rectifying issues quickly admins can ensure a smooth running system at all times.
Impact Analysis
Have you ever made a change in Salesforce, but worried about the downstream impact? Salesforce made a start with the âWhere Is This Used?â button, but this only goes so far. There are limitations on what areas are supported, such as Workflow, as well as it not working for some standard fields like Account Website.
Additionally, it doesnât work for critical things like Sharing Rules. Imagine making a change to a key field used in multiple sharing rules, this impact needs to be identified as soon as possible when configuring the system.
This is where oAtlas comes in. It will show you everywhere a field is used across the entire org. It will also give you additional details on how exactly the field is being used, beyond what Salesforce can offer as standard.
For example, oAtlas will show that a field is referenced in an Apex Class, but also the specific lines itâs referenced on, making it easy to modify the Apex Class if needed. It will show that a particular field is referenced in a Flow and also show you whether itâs part of the Flowâs entry criteria, a decision, or a record create action.
Not only can oAtlas do the impact analysis on the downstream effects, it can also do the inverse. Not only can you see where the field is referenced in a Flow, but you can also see everything that a particular Flow touches. This is helpful in understanding or breaking down a Flow in the system that maybe was built by someone else and you are trying to understand what it does exactly.
Simplified Onboarding
Starting a new admin role is daunting on its own, then add in the pressure of keeping Salesforce running smoothly once youâve taken over responsibility for the org. Youâre joining a new team, a new company, and learning about all new processes alongside keeping what is usually a business-critical system, running like a well-oiled machine.
oAtlas makes it easy to understand every part of your Salesforce org and how it supports each business process, making onboarding seamless. Each time a new team member joins, you can get them up to speed quickly, meaning they can start to make an impact sooner.
New employees donât need to spend hours poking around through objects to get to know how the org is used, they can simply visit the dashboard powered by oAtlas reports, review âSystem Documentationâ, and get started with new feature requests right away!
Impact
Time Savings
How many of us admins can say we have enough time and resources to manage our orgs and keep up with changes and new feature requests? Being able to answer a question like âwhy can user X see a field and I canâtâ in 5 minutes instead of half a day really starts to add up.
oAtlas estimates that the tool can save at least 10 hours/week per admin, but it can be significantly more depending on the task. As I mentioned before, a security audit once took me 4 months, and with oAtlas I could have exported the entire security model in 5 minutes. Ditto for onboarding a new admin.
With oAtlas, admin tasks take you less time, period. Thatâs good for you, good for your end users, and good for the health of your whole system.
Total Peace of Mind
While this might sound a bit over the top, I donât think itâs a stretch to say oAtlas gives Salesforce Admins complete peace when it comes to their Salesforce environment. Itâs very rare for any admin to be the sole administrator, and itâs even rarer for them to be the same admin who was at the company when Salesforce was first rolled out. oAtlas gives you a complete view of the org and allows you to document everything inside of it.
Managing a Salesforce environment thatâs had many years of âwear and tearâ can be daunting, but with this tool admins can be confident when developing new functionality and modifying existing configurations. Using the âImpact Analysisâ features of oAtlas, you can be sure that change is not going to break something down the line in your org.
Reduce Risk with 100% Security and Compliance
We discussed compliance audits earlier as a great use case for oAtlas, and the impact of having a tool to help with security is not something that should be overlooked. Data security is becoming more important than ever, with data breaches costing companies thousands, even millions of dollars in some cases. If your users have too many permissions in Salesforce, you could be at risk of a data breach.
With a tool like oAtlas, you can be confident that your users are only seeing what they need to be seeing, and editing what they need to be editing â plus proving this for auditing purposes is simple.
For enterprise orgs with thousands of users, security can be a nightmare. Itâs likely that user personas have changed over time, there may be multiple installed packages with their own custom permissions, and your permission sets will have evolved and changed over time so much that theyâre hardly recognizable from their original state. With oAtlas, security and compliance adherence will no longer be daunting topics.
Setup
oAtlas can be viewed on the AppExchange, simply search âoAtlasâ and the listing will come up in the search results. You can check out some additional screenshots and read reviews.
Youâll need to reach out to the oAtlas team here in order to acquire the app. Demo orgs with oAtlas installed are available to let you try it out for free.
Once you acquire the licenses, setup is fairly straightforward and oAtlas estimated it takes just a few hours to get started.
As oAtlas is an application used primarily for understanding your environment, installing directly in Production should be fine, but if you have a strict deployment process, you may need to install in lower environments before pushing to production. The team can help with either.
Pricing
oAtlas starts at $3,999/org/year (USD). The license is per org for an unlimited number of users of the app. You as the admin choose who can use oAtlas via permission sets that ship standard with the app. The exact pricing is based on the overall size of your org.
Summary
In conclusion, oAtlas is, in my personal view, a must-have for any Salesforce Admin. The time it will save admins means the app probably pays for itself in most instances. In addition, the visibility, understanding, and peace of mind it brings is well worth the price tag. By being able to understand, document, and report on your entire Salesforce org you will be able to build out more user requests with more accuracy and ensure your Salesforce org is running smoothly at all times.
Contact the team at oAtlas to better understand your Salesforce org today!
