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13 Hottest Salesforce Summer ‘25 Features for Admins
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Salesforce Release 5x Free Integration User Licenses
March 14, 2023
If you’re a Salesforce professional working with a variety of systems integrated with your Salesforce instance through an integration user, it’s likely that this is the announcement you’ve been waiting for – a dedicated user license is finally available!
In addition to the extremely popular Einstein GPT announcement at TrailblazerDX 2023, Salesforce have shared more information about a wide variety of enhancements. This includes a new type of license you will be able to assign to users: the Salesforce Integration User license. Let’s go through what we know so far about this new license, including the benefits it brings!
What Changes For You?
As you know, each Salesforce user needs to have one license assigned, which ensures their access to the functionality they need to use within Salesforce. For example, a user with a Salesforce license has access to the full CRM functionality and apps, while one with a Salesforce Platform license has their access limited to custom apps. You can view all the available licenses in your org, including this new one, by navigating to the Company Information page in Setup.
Developer Edition orgs include one Salesforce Integration license, while Enterprise, Unlimited, and Performance Edition orgs include five free licenses.
Make sure you take a look over the Standard User Licenses and all other User License types when deciding which is the best option for a certain scenario.
The new Salesforce Integration license is available after March 14, 2023 and is specifically designed for system-to-system integrations, as it only provides the user with API access. Simply put, your instance’s functionality or data cannot be accessed through the user interface by users who are assigned this license type.
This means that it’s time to reevaluate the existing integration for users in your Salesforce org and properly migrate them to an API-only access license – this will free up one of the other licenses for an actual human user who can better make use of it. The Salesforce Integration API permission set license (which includes many of the permissions generally granted to Salesforce Admins) should be used to extend and restrict user or object permissions, alongside other relevant permission sets to ensure access to an uniquely tailored sub-set of data, thus reducing risks of a potential data leak.
Additionally, the individual permissions associated with the Salesforce Integration license or the API Only profile cannot be removed – this also applies to clones of the profile.
Advantages of Using the API Only License
It is no surprise that the biggest advantage for all organizations will be the associated cost, or at least to begin with, the fact that there isn’t one! There will be five Salesforce Integration user licenses readily available per org, in the Performance, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions. Additionally, there’s also one included with every Developer Edition org.
After these first five licenses are consumed, the extra ones will only cost $10 per user per month, making it quite a bargain, especially considering that, until now, you were most likely using a full Salesforce license which is more costly.
Of course, in addition to the monetary aspect, there is the important question of security and traceability. The best practice is to have one user per integration to properly track and identify the transactions at every integration point, and maintain granular control over access – with the new license type and reduced cost, there shouldn’t ideally be any reason to reuse the same user for multiple individual integrations.
Summary
All in all, the Salesforce Integration user license is bound to make your life as a Salesforce Admin (with a limited number of available licenses) easier – you can expect more security and granularity in terms of controlling integration access, at a much lower cost.
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