Unlocking sales and service functionality is merely the first step in the Salesforce journey. Once you’ve got a leg up with the basics, you want to figure out how to use Salesforce across the various teams, departments, and use cases. How do you put the right functionality in the hands of the right users in your organization?

We’ve got it covered. In our new e-book, 8 Ways to Unlock the Full Power of Salesforce, we outline your continued adventures with Salesforce in eight steps to keep your users happy and your security and IT teams productive.

Here are a few of those steps.

Play in the Sandbox

As you think about customizing and augmenting your Salesforce, there are a few challenges that present themselves. You can build custom objects, workflows, and apps on your own, but who does this work? And where?

With Salesforce Sandboxes, developers and point-and-click admins gain the freedom to bring their ideas to life in collaborative playgrounds that can be used for development, quality assurance, integration, staging, testing, and end-user training. Independent yet fully functional, now you can test integrations, API calls, and apps before you roll out to your users.

You can choose the environment and determine the data you need copied, the size, the refresh interval, and the type of sandbox you need. All of it happens, of course, in the cloud, so delivering innovative apps happens in less time.

Every Employee is Now a Developer

With developers in short supply and IT resources squeezed, every organization needs a way to expand the pool of people who can build apps. The Lightning Platform enables almost anyone within your business to build apps and customizations fast for desktops and mobile devices using drag-and-drop tools. Lightning was designed so that anyone can customize their CRM. You can boost collaboration and agility for your developers by implementing a development culture that takes full advantage of Salesforce Sandboxes.

The Sandboxes give you the flexibility and agility you need to respond to business requests and deliver innovation to the business faster is great for your bottom line. By fostering a collaborative development culture, and leveling the playing field through declarative development, you will now be able to iterate applications on a two-week cycle — versus months or years.

Real-Time Protection

Modern businesses are mobile. Teams work in different regions and time zones, using a range of mobile devices that are carried from cafe to cab, hotel lobby to airport gate. With this freedom and flexibility to work wherever comes extra work for the teams in charge of ensuring proper system usage, access and security. The old way of addressing these risks was to build walls around sensitive data, impacting the user’s experience every time they would try to access with an irregular pattern. There had to be a better way to ensure policies were being followed and prevent any breaches to those practices.

Event Monitoring gives customers the ability to monitor and act on usage behavior in real time with a new feature called Transaction Security. Now you have a flexible, customizable security engine that gives you the power to identify and prevent malicious or unintended user actions with automated policies. The response to these actions changes dynamically, based on context such as device, profile, and location — delivering a great user experience and reducing risks.

Open Up the Back Office

As the 2016 State of IT report revealed, two-thirds of teams are integrating with 11 or more systems. This expensive and time-consuming approach to accessing siloed data systems will soon be a thing of the past.

By turning to Salesforce Connect, your business can quickly pull your IT data into your org so you can build custom apps, run queries, and create related lists with all your data from Oracle, Workday, SAP, additional Salesforce orgs, and more. Salesforce Connect allows you to tightly integrate external data sources into your apps, giving your employees and customers seamless access to data from across your organization, from any device. Now, both admins and developers have ways to connect data.

Business users will immediately be able to access these once-inaccessible data sets for a true 360-degree view of customers, a single source of truth between all your disparate systems, and improved business workflows for your employees.

And that’s just four steps. Get all eight and connect your business from back to front. Read the ebook 8 Ways to Unlock the Full Power of Salesforce here.