Cutting Costs, Boosting Efficiency: The Power of the Salesforce Integration User License

Iryna Liaukovich
Customertimes
3 min readJan 16, 2024

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Hey there, everyone! My name is Iryna Liaukovich, I’m a Senior Salesforce Developer at Customertimes. Today I want to talk about the Salesforce Integration user license. Let’s dive deeper!

Have you ever thought about how to unlock big savings within your Salesforce organization? Got you curious, right? I was definitely intrigued too! So, get ready as we explore the tactics to make the most of your budget.

Everyone knows the Salesforce licenses don’t come cheap. Of course, the cost of a full Salesforce license can vary widely based on the specific edition and features you require, but it’s still a pretty big investment.

I get it, you probably rolled your eyes, “Why state the obvious?” Have a little patience, it will make sense soon.

In March 2023, — Salesforce announced it is offering 5 free Integration User licenses per organization. They also planned to make additional Integration User licenses less expensive than full licenses.

You see where I’m going with this, right? I’m confident you understand!

Yeah, you can take advantage of this as it will free up full licenses that were previously used for Integration Users in your org.

Firstly, take a deep breath and carefully analyze which Integration users specifically you can switch the license for. I recommend doing it this way:

1. Check the current User Profile.

2. Check Permission Sets are currently available for the User, and analyze if all of them can be used with the new Integration License.

3. Create a custom Permission set where all necessary user and system permissions will be stored without specifying the license.

4. Check the IP ranges to understand if you need a custom profile.

I want to explain why. If there are several Integration Users in your organization, using different IP ranges, you probably wouldn’t want to store all of them in one standard profile. This is, - because IP ranges are stored in the profile, not in the permission set, that’s why you’ll need a custom profile for each Integration user.

5. Check the connected apps used by the current profile.

6. Check if the current profile is used by VF pages and Apex classes.

The smartest thing would be to save this information somewhere, -because once you switch licenses, most of that data won’t be retrievable. Get it done, and you’ll thank me later for that.

Now you’re all set to migrate your Integration User to a new license.
Here are the steps I recommend:

1. Assign the Salesforce Integration license and the standard Salesforce API Only System Integrations profile (or a custom one) to the Integration User.

2. Enable ‘Salesforce API Integration’ Permission set license assignment for the user (to make the permissions available for assignment in the newly created Permission set).

3. Add the newly created Permission set to the user.

4. Re-add the Permission sets that were assigned previously (since they were removed after the license change).

5. Add the Integration profile or Permission set to the connected apps, if necessary.

6. Grant access to Apex classes for the Integration profile, if needed.

7. At the time of writing the article, granting access to the VF pages for the Integration users is still available from the Visualforce Pages Security tabs.

You can now jump right in and start considering the most important aspect: what you will do with the money you have saved.
Until next time, happy optimizing!

Useful links:

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn_api_integration_license.htm&release=242&type=5

https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.integration_user.htm&type=5

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Iryna Liaukovich
Customertimes

14x Certified Senior Salesforce Developer at Customertimes