There are many reasons why you want someone else to impersonate you in Sales Cloud. Whenever you go on a holiday, become ill or just want to be lazy and found a way for someone else to do your administration, impersonation in Sales Cloud is your best friend.
As you have been identified as someones proxy, if you are impersonating that person, you are allowed to execute any action as if you were that person:
- You are allowed to update opportunities owned by the user (or not) you are impersonating
- You can create account, opportunities and leads
- You can create, update or close tasks and appointments
- …
The only thing you cannot do is to change the preferences for the person you are impersonating.
All actions performed whilst impersonating another user are being logged for auditing. The standard auditing functionality in Sales Cloud allows you to keep track of who changed what, but also allows you to see who changed what in name of someone else as can be seen in the screenshot below.
For this auditing to work, make sure that the profile option ‘Audit Impersonation Transaction Enabled’ is set to enabled. (Use the ‘Manage Administrator Profile Values’ task in ‘Setup and Maintenance’ to find out how the profile option is set in your instance)
How to set a proxy
It is very easy to set a proxy for your user:
- From the ‘Settings and Actions’ menu, choose ‘Set Preferences’.
- In the Tasks menu, choose ‘Proxies’
- Save a proxy for the exact period you want to grant the ability to specific user to impersonate yourself.
Do not be surprised if not all users can be set as a proxy. Only users that have the ‘Impersonate User’ privilege added to their role can be set as proxy.
How to impersonate another user
Once a proxy has been set, the proxy user can very easily impersonate another user:
- Open the ‘Settings and Actions’ menu
- The proxy has to reconfirm his Sales Cloud password
- A new menu item ‘Switch To’ allows you to impersonate another user.
The proxy user will experience Sales Cloud entirely as the impersonated user. The only differences are:
- a little impersonation icon next to the user name
- an impersonation warning indicating the user session is audited and that not all tasks can be performed by the proxy.
Using the same ‘Switch To’ menu option, the proxy user can switch back again to his own responsibilities within Sales Cloud.
