Terry Luschen THE TRANSITION IN SALESFORCE FROM PORTALS TO COMMUNITIES @TerryLuschen

http://www.sundoginteractive.com/sunblog/posts/the-transition-in-salesforce-from-portals-to-communities

June 21, 2014Posted in Software, Software Development, Software Maintenance

THE TRANSITION IN SALESFORCE FROM PORTALS TO COMMUNITIES

The transition from only having Sites and Site.com available to us in the past to now having Communities as a key component in allowing customers or partners into Salesforce, forces us to look at how to solve certain use cases.  I have listed some requirements below and let’s see what feature would best meet that need.

1) Public Web Site with Visualforce Developers
Requirements: I want to build a public web site that anybody can access. There is no login required to access the site.  I have access to Salesforce developers who can create Visualforce pages.

Solution: Sites 
Sites is built using Visualforce pages and does not require a login.  In fact, for new customers, a Salesforce Site is not allowed to require a login.  When you click on the ‘Login Settings’ of a Site built outside the context of a community, you will see that Login is ‘Not Allowed’ and that setting cannot be changed.  In the old world (pre 2013) of customer and partner portals this login process used to be possible.

2) Public Web Site without Visualforce Developers
Requirements: I want to build a public web site that anybody can access. There is no login required to access the site.  I do not have access to Salesforce developers who can create Visualforce Pages.

Solution: Site.com
Site.com is a CMS ( Content Management System ) that allows for drag-n-drop building of a user interface.  It is not as flexible as Visualforce, but a public site can be setup by a non-developer.

3) Authenticated Web Site with Visualforce Developers
Requirements:  I want to build a web site that should require a login.  I have access to Salesforce developers who can create Visualforce pages.

Solution: Communities with a ‘Force.com’ site.  When you create a Salesforce community you can use either a 1) Force.com Site or 2) Site.com.  The Force.com site is just like the Sites that we have always had, but the users who can log into the site are tied to the community.  When you create a community you will have to determine whether it is a customer or partner community.  In the most basic sense think of a customer community as being allowed to access data under one account.  A partner community can access data under multiple accounts.

Normally when you log into a community you land on the default community page that shows you the tabs that are available to you.  In many cases that is a great user experience.  However, if you want a fully branded site where the users do not know they are in Salesforce, then you can override that default page.  We can change the ‘Active Site Home Page’ of the site from being the default community ‘CommunitiesLanding’ page to be a custom Visualforce Page.  On this custom Visualforce page we can set the ‘ShowHeader’ tag to be false and that will remove the Communities standard Header and Footer.  Yeah!  We are now in complete control of end user’s visual experience.

4) Authenticated Web Site without Visualforce Developers
Requirements:  I want to build a web site that should require a login.  I do not have access to Salesforce developers who can create Visualforce pages.

Solution: Communities using Site.com.  Instead of using a Force.com site you would use Site.com.  Site.com is a CMS ( Content Management System ) that allows for drag-n-drop building of a user interface.  It is not as flexible as Visualforce, but a public site can be setup by a non-developer.

Final Thoughts
For all of the above solutions make sure you take into account licensing costs early in the conversation before you get too far down the road.  Sites by itself is free up to certain ‘page hit’ thresholds.  Customer communities are cheaper than partner communities since less data is being accessed.  With both customer and partner communities you need to think about whether you want to buy named user licenses or a block of logins per month.

Please reach out if we can help with your decision making on a project like this