How do you like them apples?!?

Apple picking season is coming to an end here in New England, and I've got fruit on my mind. I wish I could say that was a good thing, but what's on my mind is the rotten apples.

Ok, ok, maybe that's slightly too harsh. What I'm talking about are those things that creep into your Salesforce org for some reason, never get used & sit there - fields that don't get used, profiles that you create to pilot something and never get rid of, custom report types that no one uses. Over time, these build up and become excess baggage in your org.

Now, I don't have all the answers, but there are some great tools to help us Admins clean up our orgs a bit. Here are two of my favorites (yes, we are going back to bullet-ed lists):

• Permission sets - Now I know I touched on these before, but this is a great way to clean up and streamline your profiles. Permission sets are groups of permissions and settings that you can assign on a user-by-user (instead of profile-by-profile) basis. So instead of creating “one-off” profiles, you can use permission sets to grant additional permissions or other access to a user.
• Field Trip - This is a super cool app (found on the AppExchange, of course) that evaluates the usage on all your fields. It's a simple way to find fields that aren't being used, so that you can archive and delete them. Qandor has a bunch of really cool apps to help admins clean & run there org, but Field Trip is definitely my favorite.

So, I know it's not the right season for spring cleaning, but maybe a fall org clean-up is in order!