The access to applications and features is determined by user licenses and the feature licenses of the application. For access to the CRM application Salesforce.com we require Salesforce licenses. For Force.com, there are separate platform licenses.
To determine how many licenses are left with your organization, perform the following steps:
- Go to Setup | Administration Setup | Company Profile | Company Information.
- Below the company profile in the related list, the number of licenses available for use is shown in the following screenshot:
We can use the license to provide access to the application, for example, we need a Salesforce license for the user to access the CRM objects such as accounts, opportunities, and so on.
User licenses are consumed when we apply them to the user Profile. Only the administrator can apply the user licenses to the user profile. To apply the user licenses use the following steps:
- Go to Setup | Administration Setup | Manage Users | Users.
- Create new user or edit an existing user.
Tip
A user once created cannot be deleted. We can only make a user active or inactive. Creating an active user consumes a user license, which is directly linked to the billing of Salesforce usage. It is recommended that you practice this in a dev org.
Please consult your administrator if you are creating a new user in production org.
- Select the user license from the drop-down as shown in the following screenshot:
If we are giving access to the custom object build on Force.com and not the entire CRM application we can give the Salesforce platform license.
Depending on the type of license we get access to the different objects on Force.com. The following table summarizes the use of licenses.
|
Features |
Salesforce |
Salesforce platform |
Force.com free |
Chatter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
CRM objects |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
|
Chatter |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Custom Apps |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes- Only one custom app is allowed. |
No |
|
AppExchange Apps |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
The Salesforce platform license is used for deploying a custom app for users on Force.com. The best license to access multiple Force.com apps is the Salesforce platform license.
Apart from the user license Salesforce also provides us with feature licenses to enable us to use different types of features. Most of these feature licenses come bundled with the CRM user licenses, however, additional licenses can be purchased from Salesforce.
To determine how many feature licenses are left with your organization, perform the following steps:
- Go to Setup | Administration Setup | Company Profile | Company Information.
- Below the Company Profile in the related list, the number of feature licenses available for use is shown in the following screenshot:
Feature licenses are used to access the special features of Salesforce application. A user can utilize more than one feature license. Since summer 2010, the Salesforce CRM content user feature license has been included in all organizations at no additional cost.