Salesforce Customer Portal

What do you like best?

It is very easy to set up a new portal and setting up new users to access the portal.

The Customer Portal is highly customizable and I have been involved with several projects from the development side of the business. We had set up several customers logging into the same portal and adjust the screens and pages necessary for each individual customer. Deploying from the Staging environment to Production takes some time to get used to. You have to make sure that you have above a certain percentage of code that has been tested. Without this being met, you are unable to deploy to production. If there is a nuance between Staging and Production test code, you could have an issue on Deployment night.

What do you dislike?

Being able to hide and show various tabs based on the users role was tricky to implement. If you have to create something that deviates from the normal Saleforce offering was difficult.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you require users to log into a system and have the site customized to specific user roles, this product would be good to try and implement your solution with.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We wanted to satisfy several customers accessing single point of entry to be able to provide return products to a customer. By allowing different companies to log into the same portal, Salesforce is able to adjust the look and feel for each customers experience. This being all configurable.