For a person getting started with Salesforce, the first login experience in the org can be a little overwhelming. There are multiple apps, tabs and hundreds of settings. Before you start development in Salesforce or learn org administration, you need to get accustomed to the org first.
First login experience
When you login into a salesforce developer org for the first time, you are welcomed by the following screen.
The 3 main components of this page are as follows
The app launcher
In Salesforce, we have different apps to perform different kinds of actions. For example, to support your sales operation, you need to create Opportunities. For that you will open the Sales app. If you want to use your org for customer support and want to log a Case, you will open the Service app. Clicking on the app launcher will show you a list of apps available to you.
Tabs
Tabs are basic building blocks of apps. An app can consist of one or more tabs. Tabs can enclose Objects (a very important concept in Salesforce which we will take up in a later post) or pages or Lightning components. For example in the Sales app if you want to create an Opportunity, you will need to open the Opportunity tab. To create an Account you will need to create an Account tab and so on.
Setup Panel
The setup panel is where you will find all the settings for the org. Inside this panel you can tweak the org as per your business use case. This panel is especially important for Administrators as they will spend almost all of their time in it. To navigate to setup, you need to click the wheel icon on the top of the page and then click on “Setup”. The setup has a “Quick Find” search box at the top where you can quickly search for the setting you are looking for.
