Salesforce: Grant Login Access Using a Link

If you have ever been an administrator of Salesforce for any organization, you have inevitably had to request that a user grant you login access in order to assist them with a question or issue for which they requested your assistance.

I know whenever I needed someone to grant me login access to their Id I would send them an Email with instructions similar to:

Click Setup > My Personal Information (Under Personal Setup) > Grant Login Access
On the resulting page you will see a section reading "Grant login access to your administrator"
Under that section is a field reading "Access Expiration Date" - enter a date of next week Friday
Click Save
Respond via Email when steps above are completed

It never really occurred to me that this process of granting login access could be easier. Thanks to one of my colleagues, I learned that I could make this process much easier by simply including a clickable link in my message to the user.

Here's a possible link for granting login access:

https://na2.salesforce.com/secur/useraccessdateedit.jsp?retURL=%2Fhome%2Fhome.jsp&setupid=GrantLogin&p2=1/1/2012&save=1

Using URL parameters in the link I can essentially enter a date and force the save then send the user to another page. In the example above, I've basically redirected the user to the Home tab after I entered and saved a login expiration date of January 1, 2012.

The issue, I've come to realize, with this clickable link solution for granting login access to local administrators is that the user can sometimes get confused about whether clicking the link actually did anything. Try it yourself and you will see that upon clicking the link you will be directed to the Home tab. Unless you are not yet logged into Salesforce then you will click the link, login to the app and then get to the Home tab. As you can see, it looks like nothing really happened.

After a few confused user responses I thought it would be useful to create a "success" or "thank you" page in order to assure the user that upon click of the link that something was actually done. The concept was to have the user click a 'grant login access' link in an Email, get to a page telling them that login access was granted successfully and then redirect the user to the Home tab.

To accomplish my goal I need to first create an sControl with some basic messaging. Here is the code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>
<head>
	<title>Grant Login Thank You Notification</title>
<link href="/sCSS/13.0/Theme2/maintenance.css" type="text/css" media="handheld,print,projection,screen,tty,tv" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

<body>
<div id="red">
	<div id="box">
		<h1>Thank You!</h1>
		<h2>- Updates have been made and saved -</h2>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
		<p>Please be advised you have granted login access to your local Salesforce administrator.<BR><BR>Your admin will now be able to assist you with troubleshooting any Salesforce issues/questions you may have.<BR><BR></p>
		<p class="input"><a href="/home/home.jsp" class="continue">Continue</a></p>
		<p>&nbsp;</p>
	</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

The resulting sControl looks like the graphic below:

sControl Look & Feel

I would normally walk through the steps of creating this sControl but that isn't really the point of my post today. So if you would like to add this sControl to your org you can simply click the link below:

Create z_Grant_Login_Access_Notification_Page Custom S-Control

Clicking the link will actually create a new sControl in your org and give it a label of "z_Grant Login Access Notification Page". Feel free to change any of the information entered for you including the content of the sControl just make sure that the Type selection remains set to "HTML".

After you've finished your changes you will need to click the Save button. Once saved, you will be directed to the sControl detail page. For the next step we will need the Id of the sControl you just created. To get the Id simply look at the URL for the sControl detail page. It will look something like http://na1.saleforce.com/01N300000002M7c. The Id is the portion of the URL after the last forward slash (/) or 01N300000002M7c in our example here.

So now back to our objective of getting a link to users that actually will inform them that their clicking of it actually did grant an admin login access. For this we will need to rewrite our original link from this post and modify it slightly to utilize the sControl we also created in this post. Here's the link we will use:

https://na1.salesforce.com/secur/useraccessdateedit.jsp?retURL=%2Fservlet%2Fservlet.Integration%3Flid%3DXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX%26ic%3D1&setupid=GrantLogin&p2=1/1/2012&save=1

This link, as it stands now, will not work for you. You will need to replace a portion of the string with the Id of your sControl. The specific portion to replace is the text reading XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. When you replace that text with the 15 character Id of your sControl you will then be able to test your link and ensure that it works.

The beauty of this link is the simplicity to your end user. Set it up and try it out. You'll agree that this is useful for admins and simple for end users.
-greg

Greg Hacic

Salesforce Links

Apex Developer's Guide

AppExchange

API Developer's Guide

AJAX Developer's Guide

Force.com Developer's Network

Salesforce Ideas?

System Status

User Groups

Visualforce Developer's Guide

Services

Salesforce Strategy
Salesforce Development
Salesforce Implementation
Salesforce Integration
Salesforce Support
Email Marketing
Keyword Marketing
Cost Per Click
Cost Per Acquisition
Cost Per Thousand