How to Implement My Domain

My Domain allows your company to utilize a custom URL for their Salesforce organization. There are a lot of benefits to deploying a My Domain subdomain. Two of the most important reasons:

1.  Your company’s Salesforce org gets a URL to showcase their unique brand and aesthetic.

2. It makes user logins more secure, simple and easy to track.

The Basics: Setting up My Domain

 We highly recommend configuring My Domain in a recently refreshed sandbox, testing all of the components and then configuring your production environment.  Configuring My Domain in a sandbox will not affect the availability of a domain name in production.

1. Go to Set-up, type “My Domain” in the Quick Find box and click My Domain. Here you get to choose a custom name for your URL. Typically, a company’s name goes in this box: mycompanyname.salesforce.org for example but you can choose whatever name you like if it’s available.

2. Type the name into the box and click “Check Availability.” Salesforce will check to see if the name can be used. 

3. Once you get the OK, click “Register”. This may take a few minutes but once you have the confirmation (via email or by refreshing the page) you can activate the new domain by clicking the Log-in button. 

Now that you’ve completed these steps, it’s time to do some testing!

After Activation

Testing the new domain is an important step. The My Domain deployment can only be undone by Salesforce Customer Service so it’s important to test all the processes that could be impacted by the domain change BEFORE implementing the change in production.

Hard Coded URL Links:

Be sure to test any hard-coded URLs that redirect users to files or documents that were uploaded to Salesforce prior to the domain change.

Visualforce Pages:

Review your Visualforce pages and ensure that the reference URL is using the new custom domain URL.

Salesforce Integrations:

Work with your IT department to ensure that any integrated apps that use the standard Salesforce URL are updated and tested. You don’t want critical apps being disabled when you deploy the new URL. Your integrations will stop working once My Domain is deployed because they will not be pointing to the custom URL.

Feeling Fancy?  

Salesforce allows you to put your own creative touches on the login page. You have the ability to set the login page color and upload a logo that will display above the login fields. You can also customize the right side of the login page by pointing it to a website or specific web page.  Just place a URL in the “Right frame URL” box in the My Domain setup. 

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve tested everything click ‘deploy to all users.”

Go, Go, Go!

Deploying My Domain also gives you control over how users access your Salesforce org.

You will need to determine if your users can login from the standard Salesforce URL (https://login.salesforce.com) or if they can only use the custom URL.

You will also need to establish the redirection settings which determines how your users will access your Salesforce org.   The redirect options are:

• “Redirect to the same page within the domain” allows users to continue to log in from www.salesforce.com rather than using your custom URL.

• “Redirect with a warning to the same page within the domain” reminds users to use the custom URL before redirecting them to the page.

• “Don’t redirect (recommended)” requires users to use your custom URL immediately. Users will not be able to login using the standard Salesforce URL if you select this option.

Best Practice Tips

Planning always helps to reduce confusion and calamity!  We recommend using the below My Domain roll-out checklist:

1. Notify IT of the planned change date at least 30 days in advance and provide another reminder 15 days in advance.

2. Notify users of the upcoming URL change at least 5 days in advance and send out a reminder 1 day before the change.

a. Remind users that any bookmarks that they have saved in their web browsers will need to be changed or they will not work.

b. If your using Lightning, consider adding a Rich Text component to the user Home Page and announce the change there as well

3. Set redirection policy to “Redirect with a warning to the same page within the domain” so that users will receive a warning regarding the domain change and redirect them to the correct URL

a. Leave the “soft” warning redirection policy in place for at least a week. If you have a large organization, you may need to leave it in place longer to give your users time to update their bookmarks and acclimate to the change.

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