There are many occasions where it is useful for you to log in as one of the users in your organization. This could be, say, to check data access from their role or profile or to check reports or dashboards, and so on.

Rather than instructing individuals one by one, you can save time for both yourself and the users in your organization by preparing a how-to guide to help users grant login access to you. Produce a how-to guide that lists the steps that need to be taken to create the required setting; the following is an example:

When the Administrators Can Log in as Any User feature is enabled, users will no longer have the option to grant login access to administrators, but they can still grant login access to Salesforce.com support.

Where additional apps have been installed, the list of entities that users can select to grant access might increase. For example, if your organization has installed the Nonprofit Starter Pack app published by the Salesforce.com Foundation (see http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/nonprofitstarterpack), you will see the option to grant access to this organization's support team, as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating custom user fields

You can create custom fields for users and set custom links that appear on the user detail page. To go to the user field's page, navigate to Setup | Customize | Users | Fields, and then scroll down to the User Custom Fields section.

The User object can be considered a special object in Salesforce, as there are restrictions on what can be configured. For example, there can be only one record type and page layout for the User object.