Portals and Communities in Salesforce

Salesforce Portals and Communities in Salesforce empower your customers and partners by providing a social forum directly related to your internal business processes so that they can connect with the right information and the right people at the right moments.

Portals in Salesforce:

Portals were a thing of the past they are not available for new organizations. When it was available there were different portals for organizations like

Customer Portal:

It allows customers to manage their cases, view solutions/knowledge, contribute to communities (questions, answers, ideas), and access data within custom objects.

Partner Portal:

The key difference between the customer portal and partner portal is that partner users can access leads and opportunities. This allows your organizations and its partners to collaborate on your organization’s sales pipeline. Partners can also manage cases, view solutions/knowledge, contribute to communities (questions, answers, ideas), and access data within custom objects.

Self-Service Portal:

It allows customers to manage cases and view solutions/knowledge.

Salesforce Communities:

Communities in Salesforce replace these portals. Portals essentially gave external users (partners, customers, etc.) the ability to access Salesforce whereas Communities is aimed at connecting the right people (whether internal users, partners, or customers) together within Salesforce.

The structure of the features is similar, but there are several differences as well:

1. External users (partners/customers) can communicate via Chatter in Communities. Portals do not support Chatter.

2. The standard Communities user interface is very close to that of a regular internal Salesforce user. The out of the box portal user interface looks dated.

3. The licensing model for each is similar; however, Communities may have a slightly higher fee.

Let’s head on to the next chapter, MVC Architecture.