Setup my domain on Salesforce

Currently I am setting up SSO (single sign on) for my Salesforce environment. As part of this setup, i needed to setup a domain for the environment first. It is a very simple setup in Salesforce.

You may want to setup a domain for your environment for different reasons -
1. Add some branding to your environment (your own environment specific url, a branded login page with your company logo, etc)
2. Security reasons - setup your own login url and force your users to use this. It will prevent access from the standard salesforce login url.
3. Add single sign on for your org with required authentication capabilities

Below are the steps I followed for setting up a My Domain url in Salesforce -

• Navigate to Setup -> Domain Management -> My Domain
• Populate a unique value in the textbox for the domain name. Choose a value that will make sense to your company and environment. An example screenshot below -

• Click the register Domain button. The registration takes some time. You will see a message as shown below first -

• Once the domain gets registered, refreshing the page will indicate the same. At this point you can test your login by trying out the new domain you created - 

you should be able to login by accessing your domain url successfully.

To test you can click the "Click here to login" button in the My Domain setup page.

Note: Setting up a my domain does not prevent users from being able to login from the standard salesforce login url - https://login.salesforce.com. You will prevent that in a step further below.

• At this point, you can do some branding for your domain. Click the Edit button in the Authentication Configuration section of the My Domain page
• In the resulting page, choose the following to do your branding - 
• Logo for your company
• background color of the login page
• Right Frame URL - choose what you want to show on the right hand side on the login page
• Authentication Service (see below)
• Authentication Service - You can leave this as Login Page to allow users to login with their salesforce username and password. If you wish to configure your domain for Single Sign On, you will have to choose it here. Please see my next few blogs for figuring out how to setup SSO in Salesforce.
• Now you are ready to deploy this to your users. Note this is not reversible. For this click the "Deploy to Users" button.
• After deploying to users, you can choose to prevent users from logging in from the standard Salesforce login. For doing this, after you deploy to users, click the Edit button on the My Domain Settings section -

Now your domain is ready and should be available for use by your users. Enjoy!