Mass Assignment of Permission Set Options
Mass Assignment of Permission Set Options

Mass Assignment of Permission Set Options

02/03/2014 by Justin Edelstein
With the Spring 14 release of Salesforce.com comes a new feature where admins can mass assign and mass revoke permission sets to users.

We at Arkus have had that problem solved for a few years now with The Permissioner. Let’s take a look at a quick comparison between the two ways to mass assign and revoke Permission Sets.

The Permissioner

The Permissioner dramatically reduces the time involved with assigning and revoking permission sets assignments to multiple users. Using a simple interface, administrators can select one or more permission sets to assign to one or more users at a time up to 1,000 assignments. Once the action is completed an email gets sent with all the results to the user who submitted the request to assign or revoke the permission set(s).


Native Mass Assign and Revoke

From any permission set page, you can assign the permission set to one or more users. In addition from any permission set page, you can revoke the permission set from one or more users. Just like The Permissioner you can do up to 1,000 assignments at a time. The native tool leverages already existing User List Views to get to the users that you’d like to assign or revoke a permission set from/to. This is a bit different then the approach that’s taken with the Permissioner where you can query across a variety of different data ranging from profile to role or even public group without having to build list views in advance. The advantage here is leveraging already existing list views and quick access directly from the permission set.

** Note that the following screenshot of the functionality is from a Dreamforce presentation and not from a pre-release org because my pre-release org was on Professional Edition and didn’t have permission sets enabled.


Main Differences

As you can see there are now a few different ways to mass assign and revoke Permission Sets. Obviously I’m biased and would recommend continuing to use The Permissioner. In reality The Permissioner is a power tool for admins with large orgs or complex Role Hierarchies and lots of Public Groups. The native tool is great for quick assignments using pre-existing list views and also for those orgs that won’t allow AppExchange apps to be installed into them (yes, these exist).

Please feel free to comment below, on our facebook page, or directly at me on Twitter @JustEdelstein.