Salesforce Q&A Part 1:

Configurations

Q) What is a record type and why we use record type?
Ans. Record type can be considered as segments/slice of an object, all record types will have same fields that of the object but the data that is put into different record type depends on the business process.
Record types allow you to offer different business processes, picklist values, and page layouts to different users.
     Note:
 Each record type has their own values available for a picklist on the object.
 Create a different page layout for different records within the same object.

Q). Example where it’s used.
Ans. A practical place where the above is used is via workflow field updates or approval process field updates. As a step in a workflow you can flip the record type of a record therefore making available different fields on a page layout and different picklist values in the same field that weren’t available before the workflow happened.

Q).  What is sharing rule?
Ans. Sharing rule is the extra permission for an user/group of users to have read or read/write access for a particular record owned by other users/user group. This is additional access beyond OWD.
As salesforce doc says ‘Share members of a group to members of another group, or share users based on criteria.’.

Q). What are the ways by which we can provide extra read/write permission to a user?
Ans.There are several ways of exposing data to users beyond the OWD of salesforce.
 Sharing rules.
 Role Hierarchy.
 Manual Sharing.
 Permission set.
 Force.com Managed Sharing
 Apex managed sharing
 Record ownership.

Q). Can we have public OWD?
Ans. Yes, OWD is record level access and is Private by default. As per our organizational need we can change it to Public Read only or Public Read/Write.

Q). What happens if an object has OWD access as public read/write and a profile of same organization has read access to that object?
Ans. OWD provides record level access and Profile provides object level access therefore the user in that profile will have read access only, as the Profile will provide object level access. If we do not have read write access in object then we can not have write access to its fields.

Q). What are permission sets and why they are used?
Ans. Permission sets are extra access provided to a user or a group in addition to the access that
was provided by their profile.

Q) What is Mandatory while creating a user in salesforce 'Role' or 'Profile'? Why? and Why not?
Ans. A profile is must while creating an user in any sandbox or Prod instance. We create profile to grant the user permission over Object and its fields with additional permission for that Org.
But for role its not important because by default the user has read write access to certain objects and its fields defined by OWD. If a role is provided then the user will only able to view the objects/ fields of the users who have role in lower hirarchy of the created user.

Q) How can we achive the goal of providing an user U1 read write access and another user U2 read access only? U1 and U2 belongs to same profile.
 Ans. It is clear that the profile has read access to the object. Therefore we have to create a permission set for User U1 to have read write access on that Object.