If you are working as a Salesforce admin/developer you've probably heard somewhere that Salesforce is planning to make a significant change regarding profiles. The main idea is that most of the permissions will no longer be managed through the profiles, but instead through a Permission Set. Profile will still be used, for things like login hours, session settings and probably some additional items.
Currently, the plan is for Spring '26 release.
It can be said that there is time until this change and there is no need to rush, however this is major change with significant impact and we can notice in the latest versions of Salesforce that some new features provide the tools to support the transition.
For example:
- Field-Level Security for Permission Sets during Field Creation
This new feature allows admin when creating fields to set permissions for a premium set, instead of a profile.
- User Access Policies (Beta)
Allow to define a set of permissions for users and assigning them based on criteria.
You can activate those new features, along with other, on the User Management Settings
Of course, as part of the transition, admin might need to do some adjustment with their current implementation. If you work according to best practices, you may not need to make any changes, because for quite a long time Salesforce has been recommending to manage the permissions for fields and objects using a permission set,
If not, you'll might need to make a few adjustments to migrate your implementation. Like creating new Permission Sets, setup their content and assign them to users.
The application Permissions Helper is a free app that allows managing profile and permission sets more easily, and facilitates the process when it is required to work with bulk operations.
A special feature has been added to the application to help with the process of shifting to a Permission Sets usage. It allows you to copy the permissions from a profile to a Permission Set with a few steps:
1. Manually create new Permission Set.
2. Go to the tab Update Profiles/Permission Sets.
3. Click the button Copy Profile to Permission Set.
4. Select the relevant Profile and Permission Set and click Copy.
Here is a quick demo
