Salesforce SSO: What it is + How it works

Alex Colburn – September 7, 2021

The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.

On this episode of The Developers Speak, Tom explains what Salesforce Single Sign On (SSO) is and how it works. He also shares a tip about how to make it work "in the wild".



Hi everyone. I'm Tom, and I'm a Salesforce developer at Digital Mass. Today, I'm going to talk about single sign-on in Salesforce. We'll cover what it is and what benefits it can offer an organization that implements it.

What is Single Sign-On Authentication

Single sign-on is a method of authentication that allows a user to have one username and one password and sign into several independent software systems or applications without having individual username and password combinations.

Benefits of SSO for teams

Single sign-on can prevent a lot of headaches for an organization and users when it comes to managing username and password combinations. For example, if you have 20 applications that you need to sign into, that is a lot to remember. It's even more tedious if you have to change passwords every 90 days. Any organization that uses Okta or Microsoft Azure can easily set up single sign-on with Salesforce.

SSO with Experience Cloud Pages


Most organizations will have the use case of needing their own users to log into their own Salesforce instance. In thewild, I have encountered an organization needing external users to sign into a Salesforce Experience Cloud page that my clients owned. The secret sauce is replacing the Salesforce instance URL with the Experience Cloud login URL where required by Okta/Azure. Just put in your Salesforce Experience Cloud login page URL in every field, except for the audience restriction field.

I hope you learned something about Single Sign-On today and how great it is for an organization. Many organizations are moving in this direction, so it's a good idea to learn how to set it up. If this video helped you like the post or share it with someone who might also find it interesting. Thank you.

About the Developer:

Meet Tom: Salesforce Developer and full-stack star.