Customer - Portal - Guide Salesforce

Customer Portal Guide
Salesforce, Summer ’24
Last updated: March 18, 2024

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names and marks. Other marks appearing herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTENTS
What customer portals can I create with Salesforce? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Set Up Your Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Enable Your Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Use the Convert Portal User Access Wizard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Creating Multiple Customer Portals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Customer Portal User Licenses and Custom Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer Portal Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Enable Answers in the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Enable Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Enable Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Enable Ideas in the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Enable Salesforce Knowledge in the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Customize Your Customer Portal Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Configuring Multilingual HTML Messages for Customer Portals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Enable Single Sign-On for Portals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
What impact does Communities have on Customer Portal customers? . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
About High-Volume Portal Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Give Access to Records Using Sharing Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Grant High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Grant High-Volume Portal or Community Users Access to User Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Share Records Owned by High-Volume Portal Users to Salesforce Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
View Sharing Sets for High-Volume Portal Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
About Customer Portal User Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Work with Customer Portal Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Enable the Customer Portal for Contacts and Person Accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Roles Per Customer Portal Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Disable and Deactivate Portal Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Disable Customer Accounts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Contents
Edit Customer Portal User Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Reset Customer Portal User Passwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Delegate Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super User . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
WHAT CUSTOMER PORTALS CAN I CREATE WITH
SALESFORCE?
Salesforce provides three ways to help you manage your customers.
Chatter Answers Salesforce Customer Portal Self-Service-Portal

Purpose Provides customers with a Web Provides customers with an online Provides customers with an online
Community to resolve their support channel to resolve their support channel to resolve their
inquiries with other community inquiries without contacting a inquiries without contacting a
members or by contacting a support agent support agent
support agent
User Interface Highly customizable via a Highly customizable via a Customizable via a cascading style
point-and-click editor and point-and-click editor, as well as sheet (CSS) or point-and-click
Visualforce pages, as well as functionality similar to Salesforce editor
functionality from Salesforce such as permissions, custom
features such as Answers, objects, sharing rules, and Web
Customer Portal, Lightning tabs
Platform Sites, and Salesforce
Knowledge
Supported Record • Articles • Activities • Cases

Types
• Cases • Assets • Solutions
• Questions (answers) • Cases
• Documents
• Solutions
• Custom objects
Quantity Contact Salesforce for more Contact Salesforce for more One
information information
Administrator Controls • Customize the look and feel of • Customize the look and feel of • Generate Self-Service
the community theCustomer Portal usernames and passwords
• Moderate questions and • Generate Customer Portal • Manage Self-Service user
answers usernames and passwords information
• Generate usernames and • Manage Customer Portal user
passwords information
• Manage Customer Portal user • Manage Customer Portal users
information via permissions, roles, and
• Manage Customer Portal users sharing rules
via permissions, roles, and
sharing rules
1
What customer portals can I create with Salesforce?
Chatter Answers Salesforce Customer Portal Self-Service-Portal

User Controls Users can click Edit My Settings Users can use the Customer Portal None
after they sign in to change their: Welcome component to change
• Community username their:
• Community password • Portal username

• Locale • Portal password
• Language • Locale
• Time zone • Language
• Notification settings • Time zone
• Contact information • Contact information
2
SET UP YOUR CUSTOMER PORTAL
Note: Starting with Summer ’13, the Customer Portal user license isn’t available for new EDITIONS
orgs. You can create a customer portal using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template
in Experience Builder. Available in: Salesforce
Existing orgs using Customer Portal licenses may continue to use their licenses. Classic (not available in all
orgs)
Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support site, or something else, an online community
Available in: Enterprise,
is a great place to connect with customers. Customer Communities have replaced Customer Portals
Performance, Unlimited,
and are where all the updates and development are happening. If you don’t have a Customer Portal and Developer Editions
license, Customer Communities are your only option. If you do have a Customer Portal license, we
still encourage you to check out Customer Communities to see what we’ve been up to and how it
can benefit you. USER PERMISSIONS
A Salesforce Customer Portal provides an online support channel for your customers—allowing To set up and update the
them to resolve their inquiries without contacting a customer service representative. With a Customer Customer Portal:
Portal, you can customize and deliver a visually stunning user interface to your customers, and use • Customize Application
the following Salesforce features to help you and your customers succeed:
• Determine which pages and fields customers see with page layouts and field-level security
• Manage customers with profiles, permission sets, roles, and sharing rules
• Provide and organize documents via Salesforce CRM Content or the Documents tab
• Create a knowledge base for your customers using Salesforce Knowledge
• Allow customers to participate in Ideas communities.
• Display and collect data that is unique to your organization with custom objects
• Display custom s-controls and content from other websites via Web tabs
• Provide customized reports via the Reports tab
Note: High-volume portal users are available for customer portals or communities intended for many thousands to millions of
users.
Setting up your Customer Portal consists of the following steps:
1. Enable the Customer Portal.
2. Create one or more portals.
For each portal:
a. Configure the settings and communication templates.
You can standardize the communication templates sent to the users of all your Customer Portals by clicking the Set Default
Email Templates for All Customer Portals link on the Tools section of the Customer Portal Setup page. For more information,
see Creating Multiple Customer Portals on page 8.
The Convert Portal User Access wizard automatically displays after the first time you save settings for your first portal, whether
it is the Customer Portal or partner portal. You can use this wizard to help ensure that records and folders owned by Salesforce
users are not shared with portal users.
b. Customize the fonts and colors.
3
Set Up Your Customer Portal
c. Customize the available tabs and tab order.

d. Configure portal languages.
3. Optionally, if available to your portal user licenses, you can enable Salesforce CRM Content, Ideas, Answers, Entitlement Management
or Salesforce Knowledge as needed.
4. Create Customer Portal profiles.
For each profile:
a. Customize page layouts. See Customize Your Customer Portal Pages.
For set up tips and general information about Salesforce Customer Portal pages, see Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer
Portal Pages on page 18.
b. Customize list views.

Customer Portal users can automatically see any list view with visibility settings marked Visible to all users. We
recommend that you create specific list views on all objects accessible to portal users, and then assign portal users to only the
list views you want them to view.
c. Customize search layouts.

The search layouts in your Salesforce organization are the same search layouts used in your Customer Portal. Verify that search
layouts on objects accessible to portal users only include fields you want them to view in search results.
5. Set up workflow:
a. Set up workflow rules or case assignment rules to automatically assign cases created by portal users to Salesforce users or queues
by using the criteria Current User: User Type contains Customer Portal.
For case assignment rules to work on the Customer Portal, select the Select Case Assignment checkbox by
default checkbox on case page layouts assigned to portal profiles. Portal users cannot view these checkboxes on the Customer
Portal. Note that assignment rules trigger when a case is created and when it is edited. To prevent cases from being automatically
reassigned when edited by portal users, add a rule entry using the criteria Current User: User Type contains
Customer Portal and select the Do Not Reassign User checkbox
b. Create workflow alerts or case auto-response rules to automatically respond to portal users when they create a case on your
portal.
6. Configure portal user access.

7. Grant high-volume portal users access to objects.
8. Optionally, enable single sign-on.
9. Enable login on each Customer Portal.
10. Add a link on your organization’s website to the portal.
Users can navigate to your Customer Portal after you copy the Login URL from your portal’s settings and paste it into the HTML
of your website. For more information, see Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings on page 9.
11. Enable contacts to use your portal.
Enable Your Customer Portal

Creating Multiple Customer Portals
Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings
4
Set Up Your Customer Portal Enable Your Customer Portal
Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors

Customer Portal User Licenses and Custom Objects
Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer Portal Pages
Enable Your Customer Portal

To enable the Salesforce Customer Portal:
USER PERMISSIONS
1. From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box, then
select Customer Portal Settings. To enable the Customer
Portal:
2. Click Edit. • Customize Application
3. Select Enable Customer Portal.
4. Click Save.
5. Continue setting up the portal.
Tips on Enabling the Customer Portal

Consider the following when enabling the Customer Portal:
• After you enable the Customer Portal, you can create multiple Customer Portals to satisfy the various business needs of your customers.
• These items become available after you enable the Customer Portal:
– The High Volume Customer Portal, Authenticated Website, Customer Portal Manager, and Customer Portal User profiles, if you
purchased user licenses for them.
– The Enable Customer Portal User and View Customer Portal User buttons on contact and person account records.
– The All Customer Portal Users and All Internal Users groups along with the Roles and Internal Subordinates sharing rule category.
• After you enable a Customer Portal, you cannot disable it. However, you can prevent users from logging into it. See Enable Customer
Portal Login and Settings on page 9.
Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

Your Customer Portal and partner portal users appear in the role hierarchy, however, they’re external contacts who don’t need access
to your organization's internal data. When setting up a Customer Portal or partner portal, you can use the Convert Portal User Access
wizard to help ensure that no records or folders are shared with a portal user.
Use the Convert Portal User Access Wizard
5
Set Up Your Customer Portal Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard
Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

Your Customer Portal and partner portal users appear in the role hierarchy, however, they’re external
EDITIONS
contacts who don’t need access to your organization's internal data. When setting up a Customer
Portal or partner portal, you can use the Convert Portal User Access wizard to help ensure that no Available in: Salesforce
records or folders are shared with a portal user. Classic (not available in all
orgs)
Note: Starting with Summer ’13, the Customer Portal user license isn’t available for new
orgs. You can create a customer portal using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template Available in: Enterprise,
in Experience Builder. Performance, Unlimited,
Existing orgs using Customer Portal licenses may continue to use their licenses. and Developer Editions
When you first save a Customer Portal or partner portal, Salesforce automatically displays the Convert
USER PERMISSIONS
Portal User Access wizard.
The wizard affects the following areas of your Salesforce org: To set sharing rules:
• Manage Sharing
Sharing Rules
The Convert Portal User Access wizard converts any owner-based or criteria-based sharing rules
that include the Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates data set category to include the Roles
and Internal Subordinates data set category instead.
The Roles and Internal Subordinates data set category allows you to create sharing rules that include all users in a specified role plus
all users in roles below that role, excluding any Customer Portal and partner portal roles.
Note: After running the Convert Portal User Access wizard, you must recalculate the sharing rules to apply the changes. From
the Setup Quick Find box, enter Sharing Settings. Under Account Sharing Rules, click Recalculate,
then click OK.
The Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates data set category is only available in your organization after you create at least one
role in the role hierarchy.
The Roles and Internal Subordinates data set category is only available in your organization after you create at least one role
in the role hierarchy and enable a portal.
Folder Sharing
The Convert Portal User Access wizard also enables you to automatically convert the access levels of any report, dashboard, or
document folders that are accessible to Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates to a more restrictive access level: Roles and Internal
Subordinates. This helps prevent Customer Portal and partner portal users from accessing folders. Using the wizard is more efficient
than locating various folders in Salesforce and setting their access levels individually.
The wizard does not convert folders that are accessible to all users or accessible to public groups. You must manually update the
access levels on those folders.
The wizard doesn’t convert access for the following features or sharing mechanisms, but you can follow these recommendations to
manually secure external users’ access to your org’s data.
Manual Sharing
Remove Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates from the Share With list of your manual shares, and add Roles and Internal Subordinates
instead.
To identify manual shares that are shared with Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates, use this SOQL query:
Select Id, UserOrGroupId from AccountShare where UserOrGroupId IN (SELECT Id FROM Group
WHERE Type = 'RoleAndSubordinates') AND RowCause = 'Manual'
6
Set Up Your Customer Portal Use the Convert Portal User Access Wizard
Replace AccountShare with the share object that you are querying.
Apex Managed Sharing
Update your Apex code so that it creates shares to the Role and Internal Subordinates group. Because this conversion is a large-scale
operation, consider using batch Apex.
Public Groups
Review public groups that contain Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates members. Remove these members and replace with Role
and Internal Subordinates as required.
To identify public groups that contain Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates members, use this SOQL query:
Select Id, GroupId, UserOrGroupId from GroupMember where GroupId in (SELECT Id FROM
Group WHERE Type = 'Regular') AND UserOrGroupId in (SELECT Id FROM Group
WHERE Type = 'RoleAndSubordinates')
Queues
Review queues that contain Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates members. Remove these members and replace with Role and
Internal Subordinates as required.
To identify queues that contain Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates members, use this SOQL query:
Select Id, GroupId, UserOrGroupId from GroupMember where GroupId in (SELECT Id FROM
Group WHERE Type = 'Queue') AND UserOrGroupId in (SELECT Id FROM Group
WHERE Type = 'RoleAndSubordinates')
List Views
Update list views to be shared with Role and Internal Subordinates instead of Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates.
Use the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

orgs)
When setting up a Customer Portal or partner portal, you can use the Convert Portal User Access
wizard to help ensure that no records or folders are shared with a portal user.
To use the wizard: and Developer Editions
1. For the Customer Portal, from Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick
Find box, then select Customer Portal Settings. For the partner portal, from Setup, enter USER PERMISSIONS
Partners in the Quick Find box, then select Settings.
To set sharing rules:
2. Click the Convert Portal User Access link.
• Manage Sharing
3. Select the checkboxes next to the sharing rules you want to convert to Roles and Internal
Subordinates.
If there are no sharing rules to convert but you want to convert the access level for folders, proceed to the following step.
4. Click Next.
5. Select the checkboxes next to the folders whose access levels you want to change to Roles and Internal Subordinates.
The wizard does not convert folders that are accessible to all users or accessible to public groups. You must manually update the
access levels on those folders.
7
Set Up Your Customer Portal Creating Multiple Customer Portals
A particular folder may display on multiple rows in the wizard. This is because the wizard displays a row for each Role, Internal and
Portal Subordinates category to which a folder is shared.
6. Click Next.
7. Click Save to apply your selected changes.
Creating Multiple Customer Portals

After you have enabled the Salesforce Customer Portal, you can create multiple Customer Portals
EDITIONS
to satisfy the various business needs of your customers.
To create more than one Customer Portal: Available in: Salesforce
Classic (not available in all
orgs)
select Customer Portal Settings.
2. Click New. Available in: Enterprise,
3. Follow the same steps used to set up your organization's first Customer Portal. See Set Up Your and Developer Editions
Customer Portal on page 3.
USER PERMISSIONS
Implementation Tips To create multiple Customer
• Portal users can only log into Customer Portals assigned to their profile. To assign a profile to Portals:
a Customer Portal, select the name of a portal from the Customer Portal Setup page, click Edit • Customize Application
Profiles in the Assigned Profiles section, and select the Active checkbox next to the profile
you want to assign to the portal.
A portal user can access all the Customer Portals assigned to his or her profile with one username and password.
You can view the number of active users associated with each profile assigned to a Customer Portal by creating a custom summary
report and adding Profile to your report columns.
• The settings on the following items apply to both your organization and your Customer Portals:
– List views
– Search layouts
– Case assignment rules
– Workflow alerts
Best Practices
• Because you can uniquely customize the fonts, colors, email templates, and login message of each Customer Portal you create, you
can build a Customer Portal for each product and customer service level supported by your organization. For example, if your
organization provides gold, silver, and bronze levels of customer support, then you could create a unique Customer Portal for each.
• You can standardize the communication templates sent to the users of all your Customer Portals by clicking the Set Default Email
Templates for All Customer Portals link on the Tools section of the Customer Portal Setup page. These settings determine the
email templates to use when sending email notifications, such as a new case comment or a reset password, to portal users whose
profiles are associated with more than one Customer Portal.
By default, sample templates are automatically selected for you in the New User Template, New Password Template,
and Lost Password Template lookup fields. However, sample templates are not selected for you in the New Comment
8
Set Up Your Customer Portal Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings
Template and Change Owner to Portal User Template lookup fields. Unless you select templates for these
fields, users whose profiles are associated with more than one Customer Portal will not receive email notifications when new
comments are added to their cases or when they become the new owner of a record in the Customer Portal. Email templates must
be marked as Available for Use to be sent to portal users.
Tip: Because the default email templates are sent to users of multiple Customer Portals, we recommend that you create
default email templates that do not contain portal-specific branding.
• You cannot delete a Customer Portal, but you can prevent users from logging into a portal by deselecting the Login Enabled
checkbox. For more information, see Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings on page 9.
• You can create multiple Customer Portals that display different tabs for users with the same profile, as long as the profile has access
to each object displayed on a tab. For more information, see Customizing Your Customer Portal Tabs on page 23.
Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings

EDITIONS
2. Click Edit next to the name of the Salesforce Customer Portal you want to customize. Available in: Salesforce
3. Set the following options:
orgs)
Setting Description Available in: Enterprise,

Name Name of the Customer Portal as displayed on
and Developer Editions
the portal's detail and edit pages, as well as
the Customer Portal Setup page. The name of
the Customer Portal is not displayed on portal USER PERMISSIONS
pages, but it does display in the browser title
To enable login and settings
bar.
for the Customer Portal:
Description A description of the Customer Portal as • Customize Application
displayed on the portal's detail and edit pages.
The description of the Customer Portal is not
displayed in the portal.
Login Enabled Allows users to log in to the Customer Portal.

We recommend that you do not select this
checkbox until you have completed the steps
described in Setting Up Your Customer Portal.
Note: Users must be able to log in to

the Customer Portal, be within their
user profile’s restricted IP range, and
be within designated Login Hours in
order to be able to reset their
passwords.
Administrator Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a

default administrator for your Customer Portal.
All email notifications regarding users who
9
Setting Description
self-register for your Customer Portal will be sent to this Salesforce
user.
Notifications include information about registration errors and
any other issues self-registering customers may experience, such
as inadvertently entering duplicate email addresses, creating
duplicate contact records, and exceeding your organization's
user license limit.
When choosing an administrator for your Customer Portal, you
can only select users that have the “Edit Self-Service Users”
permission. Furthermore, you cannot deactivate a user selected
as a portal administrator.
Portal Default Settings

Setting Description
Login URL The URL of the Web page that displays when users log in to your
Customer Portal.
You can click this URL to log in to your portal and interact with
it.
Insert this URL into your website so users can access the login
page to your Customer Portal.
The login URL of each Customer Portal you create contains a
unique identifier, such as portalId=060D00000000Q1F. The
unique identifier determines the specific portal a user can access.
If a user accesses a login URL that does not contain a unique
identifier, they are automatically directed to the login URL of the
first Customer Portal you created. Note that portal users can only
log into a Customer Portal via the portal's login page and not
through the Salesforce login page.
Logout URL The URL of the Web page that displays when users log out of
the Customer Portal–for example, “http://www.acme.com.” If a
logout URL is not specified, portal users return to the login page
when they log out.
Top-Level Category for Portal The top-level category accessible by customers in the Customer
Portal. Customers can view all solutions marked Visible in
Self-Service Portal in this category and its
subcategories.
This field is available only if you have enabled solution browsing.
Enable Self-Close Case from Suggested Allows users to close cases in the Customer Portal directly from
Solutions suggested solutions. For example, when a user views a suggested
10
Portal Default Settings

Setting Description
solution that helps them solve a case, he or she can click Yes,
please close my case if this setting is enabled.
Show Action Confirmation Allows users to view confirmation messages after they complete
an action in the Customer Portal. For example, after a user creates
a case in your Customer Portal, he or she views the message
“Case has been submitted” if this setting has been enabled.
Confirmation messages may help users clearly understand actions
they have completed in your Customer Portal.
HTML Messages Default Language Specifies the language that portal HTML messages are displayed
in when custom language portal HTML messages are not
configured. This setting is only available for organizations that
have multiple languages enabled.
Email Notification Settings

Setting Description
From Email Address The email address from which all Customer Portal communication
templates are sent—for example, “[email protected].”
Salesforce sends the emails automatically, but they appear to
portal users as if they were sent from this email address. If a portal
user responds to a communication template, the response is
sent to this address.
From Email Name The name associated with the “From” Email Address—for
example, “Acme Customer Support.”
New User Template The email template used to send a username and initial password
to all newly enabled and self-registering Customer Portal users.
By default, a sample template is automatically selected for you.
You can also create your own template or modify the sample.
Be sure to mark the template as Available for Use.
New Password Template The email template used to send a new password to existing
Customer Portal users when you reset their passwords. By default,
a sample template is automatically selected for you. You can also
create your own template or modify the sample. Be sure to mark
the template as Available for Use.
Lost Password Template The email template used to send a new password to existing
Customer Portal users when they reset their own passwords by
clicking Forgot your password? on the login page of the
Customer Portal. By default, a sample template is automatically
selected for you. You can also create your own template or
11
Email Notification Settings

Setting Description
modify the sample. Be sure to mark the template as
Available for Use.
New Comment Template The email template used to send a notification to Customer Portal
users when a public comment is added to one of their cases.
This template must be marked as Available for Use.
Change Owner to Portal User Template The email template used to send a notification to Customer Portal
users when they become the new owner of a record in the portal.
This template must be marked as Available for Use.
Note: You can standardize the communication templates sent to the users of all your Customer Portals by clicking the Set
Default Email Templates for All Customer Portals link on the Tools section of the Customer Portal Setup page. For more
information, see Creating Multiple Customer Portals.
Tip: If you plan to use the same communication template for different objects, such as the Change Owner to Portal User
Template, we recommend that you include text and merge fields on the template that are appropriate for both objects. For
example, if your organization has a Warranty custom object and a Training custom object, and you want to use the Change
Owner to Portal User Template for both, the text and merge fields on the template should read: “A new record has been
assigned to you. Id: {!Training.ID}{!Warranty.Id}.” When the template is sent, only the relevant merge fields will display.
Look and Feel

Setting Description
Header A text or HTML file that allows you to incorporate your
organization’s branding into the header of your Customer Portal.
Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a file that has been
uploaded to a publicly accessible folder on the Documents tab.
The files you include in the Header and Footer lookup
fields can have a combined size of up to 10 KB.
We recommend that you do not add a header and a logo to your
portal because they may not display properly together.
You can position the logout link anywhere on the header by
using the HTML tag: “<a
href="/secur/logout.jsp">Logout</a>.”
Footer A text or HTML file that allows you to incorporate your

organization’s branding into the footer of your Customer Portal.
Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a file that has been
uploaded to a publicly accessible folder on the Documents tab.
The files you include in the Header and Footer lookup
fields can have a combined size of up to 10 KB.
12
Look and Feel

Setting Description
Logo An image file that allows you to incorporate your organization's
branding into the top left header of your Customer Portal. Click
the lookup icon ( ) to choose a file that has been uploaded
to a publicly accessible folder on the Documents tab and marked
as an Externally Available Image.
The file you include in the Logo lookup field can be up to 20
KB.
We recommend that you do not add a header and a logo to your
portal because they may not display properly together.
Login Message A text or HTML file that allows you to incorporate your
organization’s branding into the header of the login page, forgot
password page, and change password page of your Customer
Portal. Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a file that has
been uploaded to a publicly accessible folder on the Documents
tab.
The file you include in the Login Message lookup field can
be up to 2 KB.
Self-Registration Settings
Setting Description
Self-Registration Enabled Allows existing contacts to register themselves for access to your
Customer Portal.
When you select this checkbox and add the Allow
Customer Portal Self-Registration checkbox
to contact page layouts, contacts whose records are marked
Allow Customer Portal Self-Registration
can view a self-registration area on the Login page of your
Customer Portal. From the self-registration area, users can enter
their email address and click Submit to receive an automatically
assigned username and password for logging in to your Customer
Portal. Other email notifications sent to users regarding their
registration status include:
• Existing user, from which the user can enter another email
address or click a Forgot Password? link to retrieve his or
her password.
• New user, which informs the user that the email address he
or she submitted does not match an existing contact in your
organization. If an administrator has implemented
Web-to-Case or Web-to-Lead to capture new user
13
Setting Description
information, then the user can click a link to enter his or her
information on the appropriate form.
• Internal error, which informs the user that an error occurred
during the self-registration process and that your portal's
administrator has been notified about the error.
• Ineligible user, which informs the user that he or she is not
eligible for self-registration to your Customer Portal. This
notification is sent when a submitted email address matches
a contact that does not have the Allow Customer
Portal Self-Registration checkbox selected.
It is also sent when a submitted email address does not
match any contacts, and your administrator has not set up
Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case to capture new user
information.
Ensure that all required custom fields on users have default
values. Otherwise, users who self-register for your Customer
Portal will receive an error message.
Note that person account users cannot self-register for your
Customer Portal. When person account users self-register for
your Customer Portal, they receive an email notification that
instructs them to contact the portal administrator.
New User Form URL Allows you to specify the URL of a Web-to-Lead or Web-to-Case
form for users who self-register for access to your Customer
Portal.
The URL to this form is offered via the template selected in the
Registration Error Template field to self-registering
users who lack an existing contact record, so that their
information can be captured and converted to a contact.
Registration Error Template The email template sent to users who self-register for your
Customer Portal, but experience a registration error, or need to
complete a Web-to-Case or Web-to-Lead form to register for
your portal. By default, a sample template is automatically
selected for you. You can also create your own template or
modify the sample. Be sure to mark the template as
Available for Use.
The From Email Address and From Email Name
fields on Customer Portal settings specify who this template is
sent from.
Default New User License Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a default portal user
license for users who self-register for your Customer Portal.
14
Set Up Your Customer Portal Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors
Setting Description
Default New User Role Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a default portal role for
users who self-register for your Customer Portal.
Default New User Profile Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a default portal profile
for users who self-register for your Customer Portal.
You cannot delete the profile selected as the default portal profile.
4. Click Save to save your Customer Portal settings.
Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors

You can customize the fonts and colors of the Salesforce Customer Portal to reflect your company’s
EDITIONS
branding. Your portal’s fonts and colors are specified in a portal “color theme.” Select a predefined
color theme and, optionally, customize it to better match your branding. You can click the See Available in: Salesforce
examples link to see all of the theme attributes you can customize. Classic (not available in all
1. From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box, then orgs)
select Customer Portal Settings. Available in: Enterprise,
2. Select the name of your Customer Portal. Performance, Unlimited,
3. Click Change Portal Fonts and Colors.
4. Select a color theme from the Color Theme drop-down list. Select Custom from the Color
Theme drop-down list to create your own theme from scratch. A preview of the color theme USER PERMISSIONS
you select is automatically displayed in the Preview sections.
To change the fonts and
5. Optionally, customize the color of any theme you select by either: colors of the Customer
Portal:
• Entering a hexadecimal value into any theme attribute, or
• Customize Application
• Clicking the hexadecimal value of any theme attribute and selecting a color from the
point-and-click editor
When you customize a theme, it is automatically renamed Custom when saved. You can customize the following options, which,
when customized, automatically display in the Preview sections:
Tab Styles
Theme Attribute Description
Current Tab Text Text color of the tab users have selected.
Current Tab Background Background color of the tab users have selected.
Current Tab Border Border color of the tab users have selected.
Other Tab Text Text color of the tabs users have not selected.
Other Tab Background Background color of the tabs users have not selected.
15
Tab Styles
Other Tab Border Border color
Tab Bar Background Background color behind all tabs.
Page Styles
Page Background Portal background color, excluding search, related lists, recent
items, solution categories, document folders, and the Create
New drop-down list.
Text Text color, size, and font on all portal items, except for tabs,
buttons, headers, and field labels.
Optionally, you can change the number in the percent field to
increase or decrease the size of all portal items. Additionally, you
can change the font of all portal items, except for tabs, buttons,
headers, and field labels from the drop-down list.
Field Label Text Text color of the field names on records.

Optionally, you can change the font of the text from the
drop-down list.
Link Text color of all links.
Link Hover Text color of all links when a user hovers the mouse over them.
Field Separator Color of the lines that separate fields on records.
Bottom Border Color of the line bordering the bottom of the portal.
Section Styles
Header Background Background color of all headings, including search, recent items,
related lists, solution categories, documents folders, and the
selected tab.
Section Header Text Text color and font on the headers of search, related lists, recent
items, solution categories, and document folders.
drop-down list.
16
Section Styles
Left Border Border to the left of search, related lists, recent items, solution
categories, document folders, and the Create New drop-down
list.
Optionally, you can change the number in the pixel field to
increase or decrease the thickness of the border. Additionally,
you can select the style of the line displayed for the border from
the drop-down list.
Right Border Border to the right of search, related lists, recent items, solution
list.
the drop-down list.
Top Border Border above search, related lists, recent items, solution
list.
the drop-down list.
Bottom Border Border underneath search, related lists, recent items, solution
list.
the drop-down list.
Section Background Background color of search, related lists, recent items, solution
list.
List Styles
List Header Text Text color of the field names selected as column headings on
list views.
drop-down list.
17
Set Up Your Customer Portal Customer Portal User Licenses and Custom Objects
List Styles
Header Underline Color of the lines underneath column headings on related lists
and list views.
Separator Color of the lines between records on list views.
Row Highlight Color of a record when a user hovers the mouse over it on list
views.
6. Click Save to save all changes to the theme values.
Tip: Changes are visible to Customer Portal users when they refresh their browsers. Therefore, we recommend updating your
portal color theme at times when users are least likely to visit your Customer Portal.
Note: To customize the header, footer, and logo of your Customer Portal, see Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings on page
9.
Customer Portal User Licenses and Custom Objects

orgs)
The maximum number of custom objects you can include in a Customer Portal depends on the
total number of custom objects your Edition allows.
Also, user licenses control the number of custom objects a portal user can see in a Customer Portal. and Developer Editions
For information, contact Salesforce.
Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer Portal Pages

Consider the following set up tips and general information about Salesforce Customer Portal pages.
EDITIONS
Setting Up Cases
Available in: Salesforce
• When setting up your Customer Portal, clone the page layout for cases (Case Layout), and
rename it Portal Case Layout. This allows you to easily differentiate between case
orgs)
page layouts for internal users and case page layouts for portal users.
• By default, new cases are accessible in the Customer Portal, but you can include the Available in: Enterprise,
Visible in Self-Service checkbox on case page layouts so that you can deselect Performance, Unlimited,
the checkbox to prevent a case from being displayed. and Developer Editions
• Do not select the Show Case Email Notification and Show Case Email
Notification by default checkboxes on case page layouts. These features only apply to Salesforce users.
• Do not add the Internal Comments field to case page layouts assigned to portal profiles because portal users may view
comments intended only for Salesforce users.
18
Set Up Your Customer Portal Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer Portal Pages
• Include the Asset field on case page layouts if you want portal users to be able to associate cases with an asset related to
their account.
• Include the Contact Name lookup field on case page layouts so that users with “Edit” permissions on that field can change
a case's contact to another portal user in the same account.
• If a portal user is the owner of a case, the Contact Name field on the case must be the contact associated with the same
portal user who owns the case. You can't specify a different contact, even if they’re associated with the same portal account.
• Do not select the Show solution information section, Show Contact Notification checkbox,
and Select Contact Notification checkbox by default checkboxes on close-case page layouts because
their functions only apply to Salesforce users.
• Create case record types to set the default value of the Case Origin picklist field for cases logged on your Customer Portal.
• For case assignment rules to work on the Customer Portal, select the Select Case Assignment checkbox by
default checkbox on case page layouts assigned to portal profiles. Portal users cannot view these checkboxes on the Customer
Portal. Note that assignment rules trigger when a case is created and when it is edited. To prevent cases from being automatically
reassigned when edited by portal users, add a rule entry using the criteria Current User: User Type contains
Customer Portal and select the Do Not Reassign User checkbox.
• Portal users can view all the values in the Type, Status, Priority, and Case Reason picklist fields unless you create
record types for cases that contain separate picklist values for them.
• You can prevent portal users from submitting cases with attachments by removing the Submit & Add Attachment button
from case page layouts:
1. Edit a case page layout with the enhanced page layout editor.
2. Click Layout Properties.
3. Deselect Show Submit & Add Attachment Button.
4. Click OK.
5. Click Save.
Cases
• Portal users need the “Read” permission on contacts to create cases.
• Portal users cannot edit the value of the Status picklist field on cases.
• Portal users can edit and delete attachments they have added to their cases, but portal users cannot edit and delete attachments
added to cases by Salesforce users.
• The Delete and Sharing buttons on case detail pages are not available to portal users.
• The Email Message List, Next, and Previous links are not available to Customer Portal users when they view emails from the
Email related list on case detail pages. The Email related list is only available in organizations where Email-to-Case or On-Demand
Email-to-Case is enabled.
• Optionally, you can create case auto-response rules to automatically respond to portal users when they create a case on your
portal.
• Portal users can view, search, and create notes and attachments on cases.
• When creating a case, a portal user bypasses the Suggested Solutions page and is directed to their case if:
– No relevant suggested solutions match the case.
– He or she creates the case by clicking Submit & Add Attachment.
Note that suggested solutions are only available in organizations where they are enabled. For more information about how
Customer Portal users can self-close their own cases from suggested solutions, see Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings.
19
• If Salesforce Knowledge is enabled, you can add the Articles related list to case page layouts assigned to portal users so that they
can find articles that help them solve their cases.
• If Chatter is enabled for your organization, feed attachments are included in the Notes and Attachments related list. Portal users
can download feed attachments, but can’t preview, edit, or delete them.
Solutions
• The Status picklist field on solutions is not available to portal users.
• The Status picklist field on a solution does not need to be set to Reviewed for a solution to be visible in the Customer Portal;
a solution is visible in the Customer Portal if the Visible in Self-Service Portal checkbox is selected on a
solution.
• If you enable soution categories for your organization, solution categories are also available in your Customer Portal. Uncategorized
solutions do not display in the solution categories of your Customer Portal, but they do display in your portal's search and list
views.
• The top solutions feature is not available for your Customer Portal, but you can create links on your Customer Portal home page
to your organization's most relevant solutions.
Home Page
• Include the Customer Portal Welcome component on home page layouts assigned to Customer Portal users. Each Customer
Portal user who logs in to your portal receives a welcome message with his or her name. The users can also change their own
portal username, password, locale, language, time zone, and contact information. When portal users change information about
themselves their user records are updated but their contact records aren’t automatically updated with those changes.
Note that Customer Portal users who have the “Is Single Sign-On Enabled” permission cannot change their usernames from the
Customer Portal Welcome component.
• When designing home page layouts for your Customer Portal, we recommend adding the following components: Search,
Solution Search, Recent Items, Customer Portal Welcome, and a custom HTML Area component that includes your corporate
branding in the wide column.
• Create custom components to put on the home page layouts of your Customer Portal, such as links to custom list views, specific
documents, and top solutions.
• Custom component names do not display in the wide section of the home page in the Customer Portal.
• You can position the logout link anywhere on the header by using the HTML tag: “<a
href="/secur/logout.jsp">Logout</a>.” For more information on the header, see Enable Customer Portal Login
and Settings on page 9.
• We recommend not adding the following components to your Customer Portal home page layouts because they are for Salesforce
users: Tasks, Calendar, Product Search, Recent Items, Dashboard Snapshot, Messages & Alerts,
and Items To Approve.
Activities
• Portal users can’t be assigned to activities.
• Portal users can view completed tasks and past events marked Visible in Self-Service that are associated with
objects they have permission to view.
Documents
Verify that none of your organization's internal documents on the Documents tab are available in folders accessible to portal users.
Reports
• Portal users can run reports if they have the “Run Reports” permission.
• Portal users can export reports if they have the “Export Reports” permission.
20
• The Report Options section does not display on report results for portal users because portal users cannot customize report
results. Also, the Generated Chart section, which includes the Edit, Large, Medium, and Small links, does not display on report
results.
• Report results for portal users only include links to objects the portal users have permission to access.
• Portal users will receive an insufficient privileges error if they run a report that contains objects they do not have permission to
view.
• By default all users, including portal users, can view report folders. To prevent portal users from viewing report folders, update
the sharing settings on report folders to the All Internal Users group.
Custom Objects
• When you deselect the Available for Customer Portal checkbox on a custom object, the custom object is no
longer available on the Customer Portal, and all of the permissions for the custom object are automatically removed from portal
profiles. If you select the Available for Customer Portal checkbox on a custom object again, you must update
the permissions for the custom object on portal profiles.
Note: If you configure custom object access at a later time, permission sets retain their configuration.
• Portal users can view, search, and create notes and attachments on custom objects.
Articles
For setup information, see Enabling Salesforce Knowledge in the Customer Portal on page 30.
Assets
• Portal users can create, view, and update assets associated with their accounts.
• Assets are only visible to portal users if you include the Assets lookup field on case page layouts. From case detail pages,
portal users can view an asset by clicking it in the Asset field.
• Portal users can view and search attachments on assets.
Salesforce CRM Content
• Portal users with a Salesforce CRM Content feature license can perform any tasks granted by their library permission.
• Portal users with the “View Content on Portals” user permission have view-only access to Salesforce CRM Content.
• Portal users with the “Create Libraries” user permission can create and administer libraries.
For more information, see Enabling Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal on page 25.
Answers
For setup information, see Enabling Answers in the Customer Portal on page 25.
Ideas
For setup information, see Enabling Ideas in the Customer Portal on page 29.
Accounts
Only users with delegated external user administrator rights can view the Accounts tab and their account's detail page in your
Customer Portal. See Delegating Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super User on page 59.
Note: Customer portal users don’t see the Notes & Attachments related list on accounts.
21
Contacts
Only users with delegated external user administration rights can view their account's contacts. See Delegating Customer Portal
User Administration and Portal Super User on page 59.
Only users with the “Portal Super User” permission can view the Contacts tab and edit and detail pages for contacts in your Customer
Portal. See Delegating Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super User on page 59.
Note: Customer portal users don’t see the Notes & Attachments related list on contacts.
Entitlements
• For set up information, see Enabling Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal on page 28.
• Add the “Read” permission on entitlements to custom portal profiles; assign the profiles to portal users who need access to
entitlements. See Configuring User Access to the Customer Portal on page 50.
• Add the Entitlement Name lookup field to case page layouts so that portal users can add entitlements to cases.
• Optionally, add the Entitlements tab to your Customer Portal so that portal users can view entitlements associated with their
accounts and create cases from entitlements.
• Add the Entitlements related list to account and contact page layouts so that delegated external user administrators can create
cases automatically associated with the right entitlements. See Delegating Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super
User on page 59.
Service Contracts
• For set up information, see Enabling Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal on page 28.
• Grant the “Read” permission on service contracts to the portal users who need access to service contracts. See Configuring User
Access to the Customer Portal on page 50.
• Add the Service Contracts tab to your Customer Portal so that portal users can view the details of their service contracts. See
Customizing Your Customer Portal Tabs on page 23.
• Contract line items don't display in the Customer Portal.
Flows
• You can include flows in your Customer Portal by embedding them in a Visualforce page.
22
CUSTOMIZE YOUR CUSTOMER PORTAL TABS
orgs)
The Salesforce Customer Portal can display the following tabs:
• Answers Performance, Unlimited,
• Articles and Developer Editions
• Ideas
• Home USER PERMISSIONS
• Cases To customize Customer
• Reports Portal tabs:
• Solutions
• Web tabs
• Entitlements
• Custom objects
• Service contracts
• Chatter Answers
• Documents from the Documents tab
• Salesforce CRM Content tabs: Libraries, Content, and Subscriptions
Additionally, the Customer Portal can display the following tabs to delegated external user administrators:
• Accounts
• Contacts
To choose which tabs display to users logged in to a Customer Portal, and to customize the order in which tabs display to portal users:
1. From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Customer Portal Settings.
2. Select the name of the Customer Portal whose tabs you want to customize.
3. Click Customize Portal Tabs.
4. To add or remove tabs, select a tab title, and click the Add or Remove arrow to add or remove the tab to or from the Selected Tabs
box. To change the order of the tabs, select a tab title in the Selected Tabs box, and click the Up or Down arrow.
5. Click Save.
You can further specify which tabs users can access by editing tab settings in users’ associated profiles and permission sets.
Tip: You can create multiple Customer Portals that display different tabs for users with the same profile, as long as they have
access to each object displayed on a tab.
To make the following tabs visible in the Customer Portal, use the steps above and change the tab visibility setting to Default On in all
Customer Portal profiles.
23
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs
Allowing Portal Users to View Web Tabs

To allow portal users to view Web tabs, simply create Web tabs and assign them to Customer Portal profiles.
Granting Portal Users Access to the Documents Tab

To allow portal users to view a Documents tab, grant Customer Portal users access to the folders on your Salesforce Documents tab that
contain the files you want them to view.
Allowing Portal Users to View the Reports Tab

To allow portal users to view a Reports tab:
1. Grant portal users access to the folders on your Salesforce Reports tab that contain the reports you want them to run.
2. Set the organization-wide default sharing model to Private on objects you want portal users to report on.
3. Assign portal users to permission sets or profiles that include the “Run Reports” permission.
When you add the Reports tab to your Customer Portal, portal users:
• Cannot customize reports or filter report results; they can only run reports.
• Can export reports to Excel if they have the “Export Reports” permission.
• Do not have access to the Unfiled Public Reports and My Personal Custom Reports folders.
• Will receive an insufficient privileges error if they run a report that contains objects they do not have permission to view.
Providing Portal Users with Access to the Ideas Tab

To allow portal users to access the Ideas tab, configure Ideas to display in the portal. For more information, see Enabling Ideas in the
Customer Portal on page 29.
If your organization has the Ideas and Answers Portal license, hide the Reports tab in the Customer Portal. Otherwise, your Customer
Portal users receive an Insufficient Privileges message when they click the Reports tab. For information on hiding tabs, see Customizing
Your Customer Portal Tabs on page 23.
Allowing Portal Users to Access Salesforce CRM Content Tabs

To allow portal users to access Salesforce CRM Content, see Enabling Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal on page 25.
Enable Answers in the Customer Portal

Enable Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal
Enable Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal
Enable Ideas in the Customer Portal
Enable Salesforce Knowledge in the Customer Portal
24
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Answers in the Customer Portal
Enable Answers in the Customer Portal

orgs)
You can use the Customer Portal to provide your customers with access to an answers community.
To enable answers in your portal: Performance, Unlimited,
1. Set up your Customer Portal. and Developer Editions
2. Set up answers, making sure that your answers community is configured to display in the
Customer Portal. USER PERMISSIONS
3. Add the Answers tab to your Customer Portal. To set up and update the
4. Create Customer Portal users: Customer Portal:
a. On the contact detail page, click Manage External User and then choose Enable Customer
To create and edit profiles:
User.
• Manage Profiles and
b. Enter the required information, making sure to select the correct Customer Portal profile Permission Sets
from the Profile drop-down menu. To create an answers
c. Click Save. community:
5. If you want your Customer Portal users to have different category group visibility settings than
the account owner, change the visibility settings for the Customer portal user.
By default, Customer Portal users inherit their category access from the account owner. For example, if the account owner has a role
of CEO and the CEO role has full access to all the data categories in the category group assigned to answers, then Customer Portal
users can also access all categories in the answers community. In some cases, you may want to limit which categories a Customer
Portal user can access.
6. If you have high-volume portal users, make the data categories these users need to access visible through permission sets or profiles.
7. If your organization has the Ideas and Answers Portal license, hide the Reports tab in the Customer Portal. Otherwise, your Customer
Portal users receive an Insufficient Privileges message when they click the Reports tab. For information on hiding tabs, see Customize
Your Customer Portal Tabs on page 23.
Enable Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal

USER PERMISSIONS EDITIONS
To set up and update the Customer Portal: Customize Application Available in: Salesforce
To create and edit profiles: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets
orgs)
To manage Customer Portal users: Edit Self-Service Users
To create Salesforce CRM Content library Manage Salesforce CRM Content OR Performance, Unlimited,
permissions: and Developer Editions
Manage Content Permissions
25
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal
To add users to a Salesforce CRM Content library: Manage Salesforce CRM Content
OR
Manage Library checked in your library permission
definition
Note: Starting with Summer ’13, the Customer Portal user license isn’t available for new orgs. You can create a customer portal
using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template in Experience Builder.
Existing orgs using Customer Portal licenses may continue to use their licenses.
Salesforce CRM Content is available in the Customer Portal. Two levels of access to Salesforce CRM Content can be granted to Customer
Portal users:
• Portal users without a Salesforce CRM Content feature license can download, rate, comment on, and subscribe to content if they
have the “View Content on Portals” user permission. They cannot view potentially sensitive data such as usernames, download
history, and version history. The content delivery feature is not available to portal users.
• Portal users with a Salesforce CRM Content feature license can access all Salesforce CRM Content features granted by their library
permission(s), including contributing content, moving and sharing content among libraries, and deleting content. They can also
view Salesforce CRM Content reports. The content delivery feature is not available to portal users.
Enabling Salesforce CRM Content for Non-Licensed Users

After you have enabled your Customer Portal, complete the following steps to enable Salesforce CRM Content in your portals. Use these
steps if you have not purchased Salesforce CRM Content feature licenses for your portal users.
1. Update Customer Portal profiles:
a. Clone the Customer Portal User or Customer Portal Manager profile.
b. In the cloned profiles, add the “View Content in Portals” user permission.
c. Change the tab visibility for the Libraries, Content, and Subscriptions tabs from Tab Hidden to Default On.
d. Assign the cloned profiles to your Customer Portal users.
2. Determine what privileges your portal users will have in each Salesforce CRM Content library by creating one or more library
permissions.
Note: A library permission can only grant privileges that a user's feature license or profile permits. For example, even though
Tag Content is a library permission option, selecting it does not allow portal users without a Salesforce CRM Content
feature license to tag content.
3. Determine which libraries you want your portal users to have access to. Ensure that confidential content is not available in these
libraries.
4. Add portal users to libraries. Portal users with the Customer Portal User profile or a clone of that profile can only be added to a library
as part of a public group. Portal users with the Customer Portal Manager profile or a clone of that profile can be added to a library
individually.
5. Add the Salesforce CRM Content tabs to each Customer Portal.
Note: The Documents tab is not part of Salesforce CRM Content.
26
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Salesforce CRM Content in the Customer Portal
Enabling Salesforce CRM Content for Licensed Users

After you have enabled your Customer Portal, complete the following steps to enable Salesforce CRM Content in your portals. Use these
steps if you have purchased Salesforce CRM Content feature licenses for your portal users
1. Update Customer Portal profiles:
a. Optionally, clone the Customer Portal User and Customer Portal Manager profile to include the “Create Libraries” user permission
if you want to allow portal users to create and administer new libraries.
b. In your standard or cloned Customer Portal profiles, change the tab visibility for the Libraries, Content, and Subscriptions tabs
from Tab Hidden to Default On.
c. Assign the cloned profiles to your Customer Portal users as needed.
2. Select the Salesforce CRM Content User checkbox on the user detail page for each Customer Portal user.
3. Determine what privileges your portal users will have in each Salesforce CRM Content library by creating one or more library
permissions.
Note: A library permission can only grant privileges that a user's feature license or profile permits. For example, even though
Tag Content is a library permission option, selecting it does not allow portal users without a Salesforce CRM Content
feature license to tag content.
4. Determine which libraries you want your portal users to have access to. Ensure that confidential content is not available in these
libraries.
5. Add portal users to libraries. Portal users with the Customer Portal User profile or a clone of that profile can only be added to a library
as part of a public group. Portal users with the Customer Portal Manager profile or a clone of that profile can be added to a library
individually.
6. Add the Salesforce CRM Content tabs to each Customer Portal.
Note: The Documents tab is not part of Salesforce CRM Content.
27
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal
Enable Entitlement Management in the Customer Portal

Existing orgs using Customer Portal licenses may continue to use their licenses. Classic

You can use the Customer Portal to provide your customers with access to their entitlements and
service contracts. Contract line items don't display in the Customer Portal.
and Developer Editions with
Note: High-volume customer portal users do not have access to service contracts and the Service Cloud
entitlements.
After you have set up entitlement management and enabled a Customer Portal, complete the USER PERMISSIONS
following steps to add entitlement management to your portals.
To set up and update the
1. Update Customer Portal profiles: Customer Portal:
a. Clone Customer Portal profiles and enable the “Read” permission on entitlements or service • Customize Application
contracts. To create and edit profiles:
b. Optionally, on the profiles of delegated external user administrators, enable the “Create” • Manage Users
and “Delete” permissions on entitlement contacts. This lets delegated external user To manage Customer Portal
administrators update entitlement contacts. users:
• Edit Self-Service Users
c. In the cloned profiles, verify that the tab visibility for the Entitlements or Service Contracts
tabs are Default On.
2. At the bottom of the customer portal detail page, click Edit Profiles and activate the new profiles.
3. Customize case page layouts to add the Entitlement Name lookup field. This lets portal users add entitlements to cases.
4. Optionally, customize related lists on accounts and contacts to add Entitlements. This lets delegated external user administrators
create cases automatically associated with the right entitlements.
5. Add the Entitlements or Service Contract tabs to each Customer Portal.
6. Assign the cloned profiles to your Customer Portal users:
a. To create a new Customer Portal user, click Manage External User and choose Enable Customer User on the contact detail
page. To update an existing user, click Manage External User and choose View Customer User.
b. For a new user, select the cloned profile from the Profile drop-down menu. For an existing user, click Edit and then select the
profile.
c. Click Save.
28
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Ideas in the Customer Portal
Enable Ideas in the Customer Portal

orgs)
Ideas is available in the Customer Portal.
After you have set up your Customer Portal, follow the steps below to enable Ideas in your portal. Performance, Unlimited,
1. Create zones in the Ideas context that are active and configured to display in the portal. and Developer Editions
2. Add the Ideas tab to your Customer Portal. For more information, see Customize Your Customer
Portal Tabs on page 23. USER PERMISSIONS
3. If your organization has the Ideas and Answers Portal license, hide the Reports tab in the To set up and update the
Customer Portal. Otherwise, your Customer Portal users receive an Insufficient Privileges message Customer Portal:
when they click the Reports tab. For information on hiding tabs, see Customize Your Customer • Customize Application
Portal Tabs on page 23. To create and edit profiles:
Permission Sets
To customize Ideas:
29
Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs Enable Salesforce Knowledge in the Customer Portal
Enable Salesforce Knowledge in the Customer Portal

orgs) and Lightning
You can use the Customer Portal to provide your customers with access to Salesforce Knowledge Experience
articles. Portal users can view and rate articles but cannot create or edit articles.
Salesforce Knowledge is
After you have set up Salesforce Knowledge in your organization and enabled your Customer Portal, available in Essentials and
complete the following steps to enable Salesforce Knowledge in your portals. the Unlimited Edition with
1. Update Customer Portal profiles: Service Cloud.
a. Clone the Customer Portal User or Customer Portal Manager profiles and enable the “Read” Salesforce Knowledge is
permission for article types you want to share with customers. available for an additional
cost in: Professional,
b. In the cloned profiles, verify that the tab visibility for the Articles tab is Default On. Enterprise, Performance,
and Developer Editions. For
2. At the bottom of the customer portal detail page, click Edit Profiles and activate the new
more information, contact
profile.
your Salesforce
3. Assign the cloned profiles to your Customer Portal users: representative.
a. To create a new Customer Portal user, click Manage External User and choose Enable
Customer User on the contact detail page. To update an existing user, click Manage USER PERMISSIONS
External User and choose View Customer User on the contact detail page.
To set up and update the
b. For a new user, select the cloned profile from the Profile drop-down menu. For an existing
Customer Portal:
user, click Edit and then select the profile.
c. Click Save.
To create and edit profiles:
4. Add the Articles tab to each Customer Portal. • Manage Profiles and
Permission Sets
5. If you want your Customer Portal users to have different category group visibility settings than
To manage Customer Portal
the account owner, change the visibility settings for the Customer Portal user.. users:
By default, Customer Portal users inherit their data category access from the account owner. • Edit Self-Service Users
For example, if the account owner has a role of CEO and the CEO role has full access to all the To view Salesforce
data categories in a category group, then Customer Portal users can also access all categories Knowledge articles:
in that group. In some cases, you may want to limit which categories a Customer Portal user • Read on the article's
can access. article type
6. If you have high-volume portal users, make the categories these users need to access visible
by default. Because high-volume portal users don't have roles, they can only access categorized articles if the associated data
categories have been made visible to all users regardless of role.
7. Notify users who create articles that they must select Customer Portal as a channel option when creating or modifying an article.
If the Customer Portal channel is not selected, the article will not be published in the portal.
8. To allow users to search for articles from the Home tab, add the Article Search component to the home page layout. Ensure that
you assign the layout to the Customer Portal profiles.
30
CUSTOMIZE YOUR CUSTOMER PORTAL PAGES
orgs)
You can customize your Salesforce Customer Portal pages just as you customize pages in Salesforce:
with page layouts.
Page layouts control the layout and organization of buttons, fields, s-controls, Visualforce, custom and Developer Editions
links, and related lists on object record pages. They also help determine which fields are visible,
read only, and required. Page layouts can include s-controls and Visualforce pages that are rendered
USER PERMISSIONS
within a field section when the page displays. You can control the size of the s-controls and
Visualforce pages, and determine whether or not a label and scroll bars display. To modify page layouts:
Customer Portal users view the layouts assigned to their profile when they log in to your Customer • Customize Application
Portal. You can customize the following objects' page layouts for your portal: To assign page layouts to
profiles:
• Home
• Tasks Permission Sets
• Events
• Cases
• Assets
• Accounts
• Solutions
• Contacts
• Entitlements
• Custom Objects
• Service Contracts
Customizing Portal Page Layouts

From the object management settings for the object whose page layout you want to edit, go to Page Layouts.
By default, Customer Portal users have “Read” permissions on accounts, contacts, assets, products and price books, so that they can view
their account name and choose a contact and asset for the cases they create on your portal. They may also have “Update” or “Create”
permissions for assets and accounts, depending on the type of customer portal.
Note: Customer Portal users can't view the tags section of a page, even if it is included in a page layout.
To display a custom object in your Customer Portal, you must:

• Select the Available for Customer Portal checkbox on the custom object. You cannot assign a portal profile to a
custom-object page layout unless this checkbox is selected.
• Grant user permissions to the custom object on permission sets or profiles assigned to portal users.
31
Customize Your Customer Portal Pages
• Add the tab of the custom object to your Customer Portal so that the tab is accessible to your Customer Portal users. For more
information, see Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs on page 23.
32
CONFIGURING MULTILINGUAL HTML MESSAGES FOR
CUSTOMER PORTALS
orgs)
If your organization has multiple languages enabled, you can upload HTML messages in any of the
languages supported by Salesforce and configure the messages to display in the portal based on
portal user language settings. For example, you can upload an HTML message in French to display and Developer Editions
on the Home tab for portal users with French language settings, and an HTML message in English
to display on the Home tab for portal users with English language settings.
USER PERMISSIONS
Note the following before configuring multilingual HTML messages:
• Before you can add a multilingual HTML message to a portal, you must upload the To configure languages in
HTML-formatted file in the Documents tab. portals:
• Even if configured, portal HTML messages will not display on the Ideas, Reports, Content, or
Solutions tabs.
To configure multilingual HTML messages:
1. To configure a display language for the Customer Portal, from Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick
Find box, then select Customer Portal Settings.
2. Click the name of the portal to edit.
3. Click Add New Language in the Assigned Languages related list.
4. Select a language from the Language drop-down list.
5. Click the lookup icon ( ) next to a tab name, then select the HTML message to display on that tab. Optionally repeat this step
for each tab that you want to display an HTML message.
6. Click Save.
33
ENABLE SINGLE SIGN-ON FOR PORTALS
Single sign-on (SSO) lets users access authorized network resources with one login. You validate
EDITIONS
usernames and passwords against your corporate user database or other client app rather than
Salesforce managing separate passwords for each resource. Available in: Salesforce
You can set up partner portals to use SAML single sign-on, so that a customer only has to login Classic (not available in all
once. orgs)
Note: Single sign-on with portals is only supported for SAML 2.0. Available in: Enterprise,
To enable single sign-on for portals: and Developer Editions
1. In addition to the SAML sign-on information that must be gathered and shared with your
identity provider, you must supply your information provider with the Organization ID and the EDITIONS
Portal ID. In the SAML assertion that is sent from your identity provider, the portal_id and
organization_id must be added as attributes. Available in: Salesforce
Classic
Note: You can leave these attributes blank to differentiate between portal and platform
users. For example, when blank, the user is a regular platform user and when populated, Customer Portal is available
the user is a portal user. in: Enterprise, Performance,
Unlimited, and Developer
a. From Setup, enter Company Information in the Quick Find box, then select
Editions
Company Information and copy the ID located in the Salesforce Organization
ID. Partner Portal is available in:
Enterprise, Performance,
b. For partner portals, from Setup, enter Partners in the Quick Find box, then select and Unlimited Editions
Settings. Next, click the name of the partner portal, and copy the ID located in the
Salesforce Portal ID.
34
WHAT IMPACT DOES COMMUNITIES HAVE ON CUSTOMER
PORTAL CUSTOMERS?
Starting with Summer ’13, the Customer Portal user license isn’t available for new orgs. You can create a customer portal using the
Customer Account Portal Lightning template in Experience Builder.
Organizations that continue to use their portals will see the following changes:
• Permissions and Fields Renamed
• Permission Changes for External User Management
• Delegated Administrators Can Manage Partner Portal Users and Customer Portal Users
• Delegated Administration Available to Additional Licenses
• Visible in Self-Service Field on Activities Renamed to Public
• Behavior of Available for Customer Portal Checkbox on Custom Objects Changes if Communities is Enabled
Permissions and Fields Renamed

The following permissions and fields have been renamed to work across portals and communities. These fields have changed regardless
of whether you enable Communities.
New Value Old Value Type

Manage External Users Manage Partners User permission
Manage External Account Work With Portal (on account) Field label
Manage External User Work With Portal (on contact) Field label
Delegated External User Administrator Delegated Portal User Administrator User permission
Convert External User Access Wizard Convert Portal User Access Wizard Sharing Tool
Permission Changes for External User Management

When your enable Communities in your organization, the permissions required to manage customers users have changed. Customer
users include users with Customer Community or Customer Portal licenses.
Action Requirements with Communities Requirements without Communities

Enabled Enabled
To create customer users: “Manage External Users” “Edit Self-Service Users”
OR
“Edit Self-Service Users”
35
What impact does Communities have on Customer Portal
customers?
Action Requirements with Communities Requirements without Communities

Enabled Enabled
To see and use the Manage External User “Manage External Users” “Edit Self-Service Users”
drop-down button on Contacts: OR AND
“Edit Self-Service Users” “Read” on the account associated with the
AND customer user
“Read” on the account associated with the

customer user
To view the Log in as option in the Manage “Manage External Users” “Edit Self-Service Users”
External Users drop-down button: OR AND
“Edit Self-Service Users” “Edit” on the account associated with the
AND customer user
“Edit” on the account associated with the

customer user
Delegated Administrators Can Manage Partner Portal Users and

Customer Portal Users
Starting in Summer ’13, external users with the “Delegated External User Administrator” permission can manage both partner portal and
Customer Portal users under the same account. The delegated administrator can only manage users who have one of the profiles in
their Delegated External User Profiles related list and are under the same account.
Delegated Administration Available to Additional Licenses

Users with the following user licenses can now manage external users, if they have the Manage External Users permission:
• Lightning Platform - One App
• Salesforce Platform
• Chatter Only
Visible in Self-Service Field on Events and Tasks Renamed to

Public
The Visible in Self-Service checkbox on activities has been renamed to Public.
If your organization has enabled Communities, tasks or events marked Public are visible to any external user in the community, as long
as the user has access to the record the task or event was created on. If a task or event isn’t marked Public, only internal users and the
task owner can see it.
This field now applies to partner users in Communities too.
The existing behavior for Customer Portal users hasn’t changed.
36
What impact does Communities have on Customer Portal
customers?
Behavior of Available for Customer Portal Checkbox on Custom

Objects Changes if Communities is Enabled
If you turn on Communities in your organization, the Available for Customer Portal checkbox on custom objects no
longer appears and all custom objects are available for use in your communities. If, before enabling Communities, you had a Customer
Portal and custom objects that didn’t have the Available for Customer Portal checkbox selected, those objects become
available for use in your Customer Portal.
While the custom objects are available for use in your community or Customer Portal, keep in mind that you still need to perform some
setup so that they will appear. To make a custom object appear, you must set the custom object permissions so that users have the
appropriate access, set the tab visibility to Default On, and add the tab to the community or Customer Portal.
37
ABOUT HIGH-VOLUME PORTAL USERS
orgs)
High-volume portal users are limited-access portal users intended for organizations with many
thousands to millions of portal users. Unlike other portal users, high-volume portal users don’t have
roles, which eliminates performance issues associated with role hierarchy calculations.High-volume and Developer Editions
portal users include both the High-Volume Customer Portal and Authenticated Website license
types.
Characteristics
High-volume portal users:
• Are contacts enabled to access a Customer Portal.
• Are assigned to the High-Volume Customer Portal or license.
• Only share the records they own with Salesforce users in the high-volume portal users sharing group.
Access to Records
High-volume portal users can access records if any of the following conditions are met:
• They have “Update” access on the account they belong to.
• They own the record.
• They can access a record’s parent, and the organization-wide sharing setting for that record is Controlled by Parent.
• The organization-wide sharing setting for the object is Public Read Only or Public Read/Write.
• They access the account or contact that they’re enabled under via the API (not via the standard account or contact detail page).
Administrators can create sharing sets to grant high-volume portal users additional access to records; see Granting High-Volume Portal
Users Access to Records on page 40.
Limitations
• High-volume portal users can’t manually share records they own or have access to.
• You can’t transfer cases from non-high-volume portal users to high-volume portal users.
• High-volume portal users can’t own accounts.
• You can’t add case teams to cases owned by high-volume portal users.
• You can’t include high-volume portal users in:
– Personal groups or public groups.
38
About High-Volume Portal Users Give Access to Records Using Sharing Sets
– Sharing rules.
– Account teams, opportunity teams, or case teams.
– Salesforce CRM Content libraries.
– High-volume portal users can’t access standard Account and Contact detail pages. However, you can create a custom solution,
using tools like Visualforce or the API, where they can access those records.
These limitations also apply to records owned by high-volume portal users.
• You can’t assign to territories.
Give Access to Records Using Sharing Sets

Use sharing sets to grant portal or community users access to records that are associated with their accounts or contacts.
Grant High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records
Grant users access to records based on their profiles using sharing sets.
Grant High-Volume Portal or Community Users Access to User Records
Grant users access to other users using sharing sets.
Share Records Owned by High-Volume Portal Users to Salesforce Users
View Sharing Sets for High-Volume Portal Users
Give Access to Records Using Sharing Sets

Use sharing sets to grant portal or community users access to records that are associated with their accounts or contacts.
Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience
Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions
Determine how access is granted using an access mapping in the sharing set. Access mappings support lookups from the user and
target record to the account or contact. You can determine the objects to use in the access mapping, and they must both either point
to an account or contact.
For example, you can use a sharing set if you would like to:
• Grant users access to all cases related to their account or contact record.
• Grant users access to all cases related to a parent account or contact that is identified on the user’s account or contact record.
Sharing sets can be used with these user licenses:
• Authenticated Website
• Customer Community Login
• Customer Community Plus
• Customer Community
• Partner Community
• High Volume Customer Portal
• High Volume Portal
• Overage Authenticated Website User
• Overage High Volume Customer Portal User
39
About High-Volume Portal Users Grant High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records
The following example shows an access mapping on a sharing set. This example grants portal or community users access to all cases
associated with the entitlements on their account, even if they are not directly associated with the case.
Example:
1. Account lookup on portal or community user
2. Related account on entitlement
3. Entitlement lookup on case
Sharing Set Considerations
• Records shared via sharing sets can be seen in reports, as reports use the same underlying framework as list views and SOQL
queries.
• Records visible on reports through sharing sets still respect the limitations on sharing sets. For example, records shared via
sharing sets aren't visible based on role hierarchies.
• Portal or community users gain access to all order entitlements and order items under an account to which they have access.
• To share records owned by high-volume portal users, use a share group instead.
Grant High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records

Grant users access to records based on their profiles using sharing sets.
EDITIONS
orgs. You can create a customer portal using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template Available in: Salesforce
in Experience Builder. Classic (not available in all
orgs)
A sharing set grants high-volume portal users access to any record that has a lookup field to an Performance, Unlimited,
account or contact that matches the user’s account or contact. and Developer Editions
You can also grant access to records via access mapping in a sharing set. Access mappings support
indirect lookups from the user and target record to the account or contact. For example, grant USER PERMISSIONS
community or portal users access to all cases related to an account that’s identified on the users’
contact records. To grant high-volume portal
users access to records:
1. From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box, then • Customize Application
40
About High-Volume Portal Users Grant High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records
2. In the Sharing Sets related list, click New to create a sharing set, or click Edit next to an existing sharing set.
3. In the Sharing Set Edit page, fill in the Label and Sharing Set Name fields. Label is the sharing set label as it appears on the user
interface. Sharing Set Name is the unique name used by the API.
4. Enter a description.
5. Select the profiles of the users to whom you want to provide access.
6. Select the objects you want to grant access to.
The Available Objects list excludes:
• Objects with an organization-wide sharing setting of Public Read/Write
• Custom objects that don’t have an account or contact lookup field
7. In the Configure Access section, click Set Up or Edit next to an object name to configure access for the selected profiles, or click Del
to remove access settings for an object.
Note: Objects with Set Up in the Action column aren’t configured for high-volume portal user access. Until you configure
an object, high-volume portal users have limited or no access to its records. For more information on access, see About
High-Volume Portal Users on page 38.
8. Grant access based on an account or contact lookup:

• Select a value in the User dropdown list to determine the account or contact lookup on the user.
• Select a value in the Target Object field to determine the account or contact lookup on the target object.
For example, to grant access to all cases associated with an account identified on the user’s contact record, select
Contact.Account and Account respectively.
Note: Both selected fields must point to either an account or contact. For example, Contact.Account and
Entitlement.Account both point to an account.
9. Choose an access level of Read Only or Read/Write. (If the object’s organization-wide sharing setting is Public Read Only, then only
Read/Write is available.)
10. Click Update, then click Save.
Your settings apply to all of your organization’s Customer Portals or sites.
41
About High-Volume Portal Users Grant High-Volume Portal or Community Users Access to
User Records
Grant High-Volume Portal or Community Users Access to User Records

Grant users access to other users using sharing sets.
EDITIONS
orgs. You can create a customer portal using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template Available in: Salesforce
in Experience Builder. Classic (not available in all
orgs)
You can create a sharing set to grant high-volume portal users access to internal users or other Performance, Unlimited,
users in the same portal, enabling them to see or edit the target user records. and Developer Editions
With Spring ’14, you can also grant access to users in other portals through an indirect lookup to
an account or contact. USER PERMISSIONS
To grant access to selected users in the same portal, you would typically create a sharing set if you
To grant high-volume portal
deselected the Portal User Visibility checkbox on the Sharing Settings page. users access to records:
To create a sharing set to grant access to other users: • Customize Application
2. In the Sharing Settings for High-Volume Portal Users related list, click New to create a sharing set, or click Edit next to an existing
sharing set.
3. In the Sharing Set Edit page, fill in the Label and Sharing Set Name fields. Label is the sharing set label as it appears on the user
interface. Sharing Set Name is the unique name used by the API.
4. Select the profiles of the users you want to have access.
5. Select the User object.
Target users can be other high-volume portal or community users or internal users.
6. In the Configure Access section, click Set Up or Edit next to the User object to configure access for the selected profiles, or click Del
to remove access settings for an object.
7. Grant access based on an account or contact lookup:
• Select a value in the User drop-down list to determine the account or contact that’s related to the user, either by a direct lookup
or indirect lookup via an intermediate object.
• Select a value in the Target User drop-down list to determine the account or contact that’s related to the target user, either by
a direct lookup or indirect lookup via an intermediate object.
For example, to grant access to target users associated with another account identified on the user’s account record, select
Account.Parent and Account respectively.
Note: Both selected fields must point to either an account or contact. For example, Account.Parent and
Contact.Account both point to an account.
8. Choose an access level of Read Only or Read/Write. (If the User object’s organization-wide sharing setting is Public Read
Only, then only Read/Write is available.)
9. Click Update, then click Save.
Your settings apply to all of your organization’s Customer Portals or sites.
42
About High-Volume Portal Users Share Records Owned by High-Volume Portal Users to
Salesforce Users
Example: The following example grants your portal users access to users whose contacts are related to the accounts identified
on the portal users’ managers records. In other words, the account field on the portal user’s manager record must match the
account field identified on the target user’s contact record.
1. Manager lookup on portal user

2. Account lookup on manager
3. Account lookup on contact
4. Contact lookup on target user
In this example, to grant access to the target users, you would select Manager.Account and Contact.Account in the
User and Target User drop-down list respectively.
Share Records Owned by High-Volume Portal Users to Salesforce

Users
orgs)
High-volume portal users are limited-access portal users intended for organizations with many
thousands to millions of portal users. Unlike other portal users, high-volume portal users don’t have
roles, which eliminates performance issues associated with role hierarchy calculations. Because and Developer Editions
high-volume portal users are not in the role hierarchy while Salesforce users are, a share group
allows you to specify the Salesforce users who can access records owned by high-volume portal
users. Each Customer Portal has its own share group. USER PERMISSIONS
To specify the Salesforce users who can access records owned by high-volume portal users: To share records owned by
1. From Setup, enter Customer Portal Settings in the Quick Find box, then high-volume portal users to
Salesforce users:
2. Click the name of a Customer Portal.
3. Click the Share Group Settings subtab.
43
About High-Volume Portal Users View Sharing Sets for High-Volume Portal Users
4. Click Activate to turn on the share group.

Activating the share group can take a while. You receive an email when the process finishes.
Note: Deactivating a share group removes all Salesforce users’ access to records owned by high-volume portal users. An
email isn’t sent to you when the deactivation process finishes.
5. Click Edit to add Salesforce users to the share group:

a. From the Search dropdown, select the type of member to add.
b. If you don’t see the member you want to add, enter keywords in the search box and click Find.
c. Select members from the Available Members box, and click Add to add them to the group.
d. Click Save.
View Sharing Sets for High-Volume Portal Users

orgs)
Administrators can create sharing sets to grant high-volume portal users access to objects based
on their profiles. To view detailed information about a sharing set:
1. From Setup, enter Communities Settings in the Quick Find box, then select and Developer Editions
Communities Settings.
2. In the Sharing Set related list, click the name of a sharing set. USER PERMISSIONS
The Sharing Set detail page shows the profiles included and the access granted to objects in the
To grant high-volume portal
set. On this page, you can do any of the following: users access to records:
• To edit the sharing set, click Edit. • Customize Application
• To remove the sharing set, click Delete.
• To view the details of an included profile, click its name.
• To change or remove access settings for an object, click the Edit or Del link next to the object name.
44
ABOUT CUSTOMER PORTAL USER MANAGEMENT
To manage Customer Portal users: Edit Self-Service Users Available in: Salesforce
To manage profiles and permission sets: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets
orgs)
To create, edit, and delete page layouts: Customize Application
To set field-level security: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets Performance, Unlimited,
AND
Customize Application
To set sharing rules: Manage Sharing
Managing Customer Portal users is similar to managing regular Salesforce users. General user administration concepts like profiles and
page layouts still apply. Review the following advice for managing Customer Portal users:
• Customer Portal Profiles
• Customer Portal Sharing Rules
• Customer Portal Role Hierarchy
• Customer Portal User Licenses
Note: High-volume portal users include both the High Volume Customer Portal and Authenticated Website license types.
Customer Portal Profiles

The profiles you assign to Customer Portal users define permissions for them to perform different functions within a Customer Portal,
such as whether they can view, create, edit, or delete cases and custom object records.
When you enable a Customer Portal, the following profiles are automatically created if you purchased user licenses for them:
• Customer Portal User
• Customer Portal Manager
The settings on Customer Portal profiles are similar. However, you can grant users with the Customer Portal Manager profile greater
access to data via the Customer Portal role hierarchy and sharing rules (neither of which apply to high-volume portal users). You can
also clone and customize each profile to suit the various support requirements of specific customers. You can also use permission sets
to grant additional permissions and access settings to Customer Portal users.
45
About Customer Portal User Management
Depending on the user licenses you purchased, you can configure Customer Portal profiles for custom objects, Salesforce CRM Content,
reporting, and customer support functionality, such as cases and solutions.
Important: For portal users to be able to view their new cases, the New Cases Visible in Portal support setting must be selected.
From Setup, enter Support Settings in the Quick Find box, select Support Settings, then select New Cases Visible
in Portal.
Customer Portal Sharing Rules

After you enable a Customer Portal, the following groups and sharing rule category are created:
Groups and Sharing Rule Description

Category
All Customer Portal Users group Contains all Customer Portal users, except for high-volume portal users.
All Internal Users group Contains all Salesforce users in your organization.
Roles and Internal Subordinates Lets you create sharing rules with specific Salesforce users in your organization by role plus all of
sharing rule category the users in roles below that role, excluding any Customer Portal and partner portal roles.
Because high-volume portal users don’t have roles, they aren’t included in this or any other sharing
rule category.
You can use these groups and the sharing rule category to create sharing rules that:
• Grant Customer Portal or Salesforce users access to specific data (except for high-volume portal users, because you can’t include
them in any groups or sharing rules)
• Link Customer Portal users and Salesforce users
• Link Customer Portal users from different accounts as long as they have the Customer Portal Manager user license
Customer Portal Role Hierarchy

When you enable a Customer Portal on an account, the system creates a role hierarchy for the account’s portal users. The portal roles
are unique for each account and include the account’s name—or example, “Account A Customer User.” In your organization’s overall
role hierarchy, this account-specific hierarchy is directly below the account owner.
The roles in a portal role hierarchy are fixed. You cannot customize them or add new ones. They are:
• Executive—for contacts
• Manager—for contacts
• User—for contacts
• Person Account—for person accounts
Note: All users in a customer portal role (Executive, Manager, and User roles) have read access to all portal-enabled contacts
under their portal account even when the contact sharing model is private.
As you enable customers as Customer Portal users, the system automatically assigns roles based on the user license. Person accounts
always have the Person Account role. Contacts with the High Volume Customer Portal or Authenticated Website license do not have a
role.
46
If access to contacts are set to private, high-volume portal users only have access to their own contact and those they are granted access
to.
Role hierarchies ensure that portal users from different accounts never see each other’s data. Even though high-volume portal users
aren’t included in role hierarchies, they’re restricted from seeing records that aren’t associated with their account or contact, and they
can only see objects to which they’ve been granted access. You can, however, create sharing rules so that users with the Customer Portal
Manager license from different accounts can see each other’s data.
Accounts with different portal types—Customer Portal and partner portal—have a separate role hierarchy for each portal. Role names
include the portal type with which they are associated. For example, if Account A has both a Customer Portal and a partner portal, then
roles for the Customer Portal are named “Account A Customer User” and roles for the partner portal are named “Account A Partner User.”
To view the roles assigned to your Customer Portal users, create a custom report, choose Administrative Reports, select Users as the data
type, and add Role to your report columns. Note that you can’t report on roles for high-volume portal users because they don’t have
roles.
Note: You cannot create a Customer Portal user associated with an account owned by a partner user.
Customer Portal User Licenses

A user license determines the baseline of features that the user can access. Every user must have exactly one user license.
You can assign the following user licenses to Customer Portal users:
• Customer Portal Manager Custom
• Customer Portal Manager Standard (not available for new customers)
These user licenses determine the available Customer Portal profiles. They also determine users’ positions in the Customer Portal role
hierarchy.
The following table shows the Customer Portal user licenses with their associated profiles and positions in the Customer Portal role
hierarchy.
User License Profiles Roles and Sharing

High Volume Customer Portal High Volume Customer Portal or High-volume portal users don’t have roles. See About
and Authenticated Website profile, or High-Volume Portal Users on page 38.
a profile cloned and customized Can’t share but can transfer records they own.
Authenticated Website from one of these.
Both user licenses are high-volume Can’t transfer cases from non-high-volume portal users to
portal users them.
(Available to purchase) Can’t include in:

• Personal groups or public groups.
• Sharing rules.
• Account teams, opportunity teams, or case teams.
• Salesforce CRM Content libraries.
• High-volume portal users can’t access standard Account
and Contact detail pages. However, you can create a
47
User License Profiles Roles and Sharing

custom solution, using tools like Visualforce or the API,
where they can access those records.
Can access custom objects depending on profile settings.
Customer Portal Manager Custom Customer Portal Manager profile Can assign to either the Executive, Manager, or User role.
(Available to purchase) or a profile cloned and Can view and edit data they directly own or data owned by
customized from the Customer or shared with users below them in the Customer Portal role
Portal Manager profile. hierarchy; and they can view and edit cases where they are
listed in the Contact Name field.
Can have data shared to them just like other Salesforce users.
• Can access custom objects depending on profile settings.
• Can access reports depending on profile settings.
• Can access Salesforce CRM Content depending on feature
license and profile settings. See Enabling Salesforce CRM
Content in the Customer Portal on page 25.
• Can receive the “Portal Super User” and “Delegated
External User Administrator” permissions.
Customer Portal Manager Standard Customer Portal User profile or a Can only assign to either the Executive, Manager, or User role.
profile cloned and customized Can view and edit data they directly own or data owned by
from the Customer Portal User or shared with users below them in the Customer Portal role
profile. hierarchy; and they can view and edit cases where they are
listed in the Contact Name field.
Can have data shared to them just like other Salesforce users.
• Can access custom objects depending on profile settings.
• Can receive the “Portal Super User” permission.
• Can access Salesforce CRM Content depending on feature
license and profile settings. See Enabling Salesforce CRM
Content in the Customer Portal on page 25.
Note: This license is not available for new customers.
Note: Person accounts enabled as Customer Portal users are automatically assigned the Person Account role, which you cannot
change. Person accounts are automatically assigned to this role because they include a single user, so multiple roles are not
necessary for their account. Furthermore, all person accounts owned by the same user are assigned the same role.
Work with Customer Portal Users
48
About Customer Portal User Management Work with Customer Portal Users
Work with Customer Portal Users

Note: High-volume portal users are available for customer portals or communities intended EDITIONS
for many thousands to millions of users.
Some common tasks when managing Customer Portal users include: Available in: Salesforce
• Setting up the Customer Portal for users orgs)
• Enabling Customer Portal users individually from the Contacts tab
• Disabling and deactivating Customer Portal users Performance, Unlimited,
• Changing Customer Portal users’ information and roles and Developer Editions
• Changing Customer Portal users’ accounts
• Merging Customer Portal users
• Resetting Customer Portal users’ passwords
• Viewing Customer Portal users’ user licenses
• Granting high-volume portal users access to object’s records
• Sharing high-volume portal users’ records with Salesforce users
• Managing Customer Portal users’ permissions and access settings
• Assigning profiles to a Customer Portal
• Delegating Customer Portal user management and case and contact management to portal users
• Reporting on Customer Portal users
Tip: To troubleshoot issues for Customer Portal users, click Manage External User and choose Log in to Portal as User on the
portal user’s contact detail page. This selection opens a new browser window and automatically logs you into the portal as the
portal user. This option also ensures that the portal is configured appropriately.
The Log in to Portal as User button is only available if you have the “Edit Self-Service Users” permission and “Edit” access on the
account. The Log in to Portal as User button does not display for inactive portal users.
49
CONFIGURE USER ACCESS TO THE CUSTOMER PORTAL
To set up the Customer Portal: Customize Application Available in: Salesforce

To manage Customer Portal users: Edit Self-Service Users
orgs)
To create, edit, and delete profiles: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets
To set default sharing access and sharing Manage Sharing Performance, Unlimited,
rules: and Developer Editions
To enable Customer Portal users: Edit Self-Service Users
When setting up a Salesforce Customer Portal for the first time, configure the following before enabling users to access your portal:
1. Set up your portal as described in Set Up Your Customer Portal.
2. Assign Customer Portal profiles to a portal:
a. Select the name of a portal from the Customer Portal Setup page.
b. Click Edit Profiles in the Assigned Profiles section.
c. Select the Active checkbox next to the profile you want to assign to the portal.
Portal users can only log into Customer Portals assigned to their profile. If you are creating multiple portals, you must assign profiles
to each portal you want users to access.
3. Set the organization-wide defaults in your organization’s sharing model to Private on accounts, contacts, contracts, assets, and cases.
This ensures that portal users can only view and edit data related to their accounts.
Tip: To maintain Public organization-wide default behavior for Salesforce users, while ensuring that portal users can only view
and edit data related to their accounts, you can create self-referencing sharing rules of “All Internal Users” to “All Internal Users”.
4. Optionally, set sharing rules for portal users (except for high-volume portal users). This lets you share records between portal users
and Salesforce users or vice versa.
Note: If your organization uses sharing rules that share to Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates, then update those sharing
rules to share to Roles and Internal Subordinates instead. This is to help ensure that no records owned by a Salesforce user are
accidentally shared with a portal user.
The Roles and Internal Subordinates data set category allows you to create sharing rules that include all users in a specified
role plus all users in roles below that role, excluding any Customer Portal and partner portal roles.
You can easily convert sharing rules that include Roles, Internal and Portal Subordinates to include Roles and Internal Subordinates
instead by using the Convert Portal User Access wizard. Furthermore, you can use this wizard to convert any publicly accessible
report, dashboard, and document folders to folders that are accessible by all users except for portal users.
50
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal
5. Verify that portal users are not added to any queues and are not included in any public groups added to queues. This is because
portal users added to queues may be able to access records from accounts to which they are not related.
6. Optionally, add the Welcome component to home page layouts assigned to portal users.
The Welcome component allows portal users to receive a welcome message with their name, plus the ability to change their own
portal username, password, locale, language, time zone, and contact information. For details, see Setup Tips and Considerations for
Customer Portal Pages on page 18.
7. Optionally, allow contacts to register themselves for access to your portal. See Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings on page
9.
Enable the Customer Portal for Contacts and Person Accounts

To allow a customer to access your Salesforce customer portal, enable the customer’s contact or person account record as a customer
user.
Roles Per Customer Portal Account
Disable and Deactivate Portal Users
Disable Customer Accounts
Disabling a customer account disables customer users associated with the account. We recommend disabling a customer account
only if the account was accidentally enabled.
Edit Customer Portal User Information
Reset Customer Portal User Passwords
Delegate Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super User
51
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Enable the Customer Portal for Contacts and Person Accounts
Enable the Customer Portal for Contacts and Person Accounts

To allow a customer to access your Salesforce customer portal, enable the customer’s contact or
EDITIONS
person account record as a customer user.
1. From a contact or person account detail page, click Manage External User, and then select Available in: Salesforce
Enable Customer User. Classic (not available in all
orgs)
2. Verify the general information and locale settings, and enter any missing information. The
customer’s Username defaults to the customer’s Email. Available in: Enterprise,
3. Select a portal user license. The user license that you choose determines the permission sets, Performance, Unlimited,
user profile, and role hierarchy options that you can select for the customer user. See Customer
Portal User Licenses.
4. Select Generate new password and notify user immediately to USER PERMISSIONS
email a customer portal username and password to the customer.
To enable customer users or
If your Salesforce org uses multiple customer portals, customer users can access all to log in as a portal user:
customer portals that are assigned to their profiles with a single username and password. • Edit on the account that’s
See Creating Multiple Customer Portals. associated with the
customer user
5. Click Save. AND
6. To troubleshoot or confirm the portal configuration, on the contact detail page, click Edit Self-Service Users
Manage External User, and then choose Log in to Portal as User. A new browser OR
window opens and logs you in to the portal as the partner user.
Manage External Users
You can deactivate customer users as needed.
Important: When
creating customer
users, the
account that the
new contact is
associated with
must have an
account owner
that is assigned a
role.
52
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Roles Per Customer Portal Account
Roles Per Customer Portal Account

orgs)
You can set the default number of roles for Customer Portal accounts. This benefits your customer
portal by reducing the number of unused roles for Customer Portal accounts. You must have a
Customer Portal enabled to use this functionality. and Developer Editions
For example, if you currently have three roles created when an account is enabled for your Customer
Portal, but only need one role for new accounts, you can reduce the number of roles to one. You
USER PERMISSIONS
can set up to three roles for Customer Portal accounts. The default number of roles for Customer
Portal accounts is three. To set the number of roles
To set the number of roles per Customer Portal account: per portal account:
2. Click Set number of roles per Portal Account.
3. Click Edit.
4. In the Number of Roles drop-down list, set your default number of roles per Customer Portal account.
5. Click Save.
The number of roles for existing portal accounts doesn't change with this setting.
53
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Disable and Deactivate Portal Users
Disable and Deactivate Portal Users

There are two ways in which you can remove a customer’s access to your Salesforce Customer
EDITIONS
Portal or partner portal. As described in detail below, disabling a portal user is permanent, while
deactivating a portal user is not: Available in: Salesforce
Disabling a portal user Classic
Disabling a portal user includes the following actions:
Customer Portal is available
• Termination of the user’s access to your portal in: Enterprise, Performance,
• Removal from all groups, teams, and sharing rules with which the user is associated. Unlimited, and Developer
Editions
• Permanent loss of the portal user’s association with the contact
Partner Portal is available in:
If you later re-enable a contact for portal access, a new portal user is created that is not Enterprise, Performance,
related to the previous portal user record in any way. and Unlimited Editions
• The Role on the portal user record is removed.
• For partner users, the partner user role becomes obsolete. As a result: USER PERMISSIONS
– The user’s data no longer rolls up to the partner account owner role
To disable or deactivate
– Opportunities owned by that user are removed from your organization’s forecast Customer Portal users:
hierarchy • Edit on the account
associated with the
Note: Before disabling a partner user, we recommend transferring opportunities
Customer Portal user
owned by that user to an active user.
AND
We recommend disabling a portal user if: Edit Self-Service Users
• A contact was accidentally enabled as a portal user To disable or deactivate

• The portal user is associated with a duplicate contact partner portal users:
• Edit on the account
• You do not want a contact to access the portal in the future
associated with the
Note: Salesforce doesn’t delete user records, including portal user records. While you partner portal user
can’t re-enable a disabled portal user, you can view and update the record for a disabled AND
user in Setup by entering Users in the Quick Find box, then selecting Users. Manage External Users
Deactivating a portal user
Deactivating a portal user prevents that user from logging into your portal and gives you the
option to remove the user from any teams in which he or she is a member (for example, case
EDITIONS
teams and account teams). When you deactivate a portal user, the portal user record does not
Available in: Salesforce
permanently lose its association with the contact. You can reactivate the portal user at any time.
We recommend deactivating a portal user if you may reactivate the portal user in the future. orgs)

Disabling a Portal User Performance, Unlimited,
To disable a portal user:
1. On the contact detail page, click Manage External User and choose either Disable Customer
User or Disable Partner User. On the account detail page of a person account, click Manage External Account and choose
Disable Customer Account.
Person Accounts are not available for the partner portal.
54
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Disable and Deactivate Portal Users
2. Click OK.
Deactivating a Portal User

To deactivate a portal user:
1. For the Customer Portal, click Manage External User and choose View Customer User on the contact or person account detail
page. For the partner portal, click Manage External User and choose View Partner User on the contact detail page.
Person accounts are not available for the partner portal.
2. Click Edit, and deselect the Active checkbox.

To reactivate a portal user at any time, select the Active checkbox.
3. Click Save.
Note: You can’t mass deactivate portal users.
Tips on Disabling and Deactivating Portal Users

Consider the following when disabling or deactivating portal users (disabling is permanent; deactivating is not):
• You can’t delete an active portal user; you can only disable or deactivate his or her access to the portal.
• The following table describes whether you can delete contacts that are associated with portal users:
State of Portal User Associated to Contact Can You Delete the Contact?
Active portal user No. This is to ensure that the contact is available if you choose
to reactivate the portal user.
Inactive portal user No. This is to ensure that the contact is available if you choose
to reactivate the portal user.
Disabled portal user Yes. Deleted contacts are sent to the Recycle Bin.
• To delete a portal-enabled contact, first disable the portal user, then delete the contact.
• Cases associated with a portal user are not updated in any way when you disable or deactivate the portal user. For example, if a
portal user owns a case, and the portal user is disabled, he or she remains the owner of the case until the case is updated with a new
owner.
• Before you disable a partner user, we recommend that you transfer any opportunities owned by the user to another user who will
remain active. This is because when you disable a partner user, any opportunities he or she owns are removed from your organization’s
forecast hierarchy (the partner user’s role becomes obsolete).
• After you disable a portal user, it may take Salesforce up to ten seconds to disable the user. During that time, a portal user may still
perform actions on a portal.
• You can remove the Disable Customer User and Disable Partner User buttons from contact page layouts at any time. Doing so
would prevent users with the “Edit Self-Service Users” or “Manage External Users” permissions from disabling portal users.
• A disabled or deactivated portal user does not count against your organization’s available user licenses. However, disabling or
deactivating a portal user does not reduce the number of licenses for which your organization is billed; you must change your
organization’s license count to change your billing.
55
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Disable Customer Accounts
• To disable all portal users associated with an account and permanently delete all of the account’s portal roles and groups:
– Click Manage External Account and choose Disable Partner Account on a partner portal account.
– Click Manage External Account and choose Disable Customer Account on a Customer Portal account or Customer Portal
person account.
You can remove the Disable Customer Account and Disable Partner Account buttons from account page layouts at any time.
Doing so would prevent users with the “Edit Self-Service Users” or “Manage External Users” permissions from disabling portal accounts.
• When you disable a portal user or portal account, the change is tracked in the setup audit trail.
• Portal roles are not removed from disabled portal users associated with person accounts. However, you can remove the portal roles
manually:
1. From Setup, enter Users in the Quick Find box, then select Users.
2. Select the name of a disabled portal user.
3. Click Edit.
4. Select None from the Role drop-down list.
5. Click Save.
Disable Customer Accounts

Disabling a customer account disables customer users associated with the account. We recommend
EDITIONS
disabling a customer account only if the account was accidentally enabled.
You can’t delete customer accounts, but you can disable them. Disabling the account permanently Available in: Salesforce
disables up to 100 external users associated with the account and removes them from all Classic
communities, groups, teams, permission sets, and sharing rules that they’re associated with. This
includes both active and inactive external users, but excludes partner users associated with the
account. Additionally, roles and groups associated with the account are permanently deleted and and Developer Editions
you won’t have the option to restore them from the Recycle Bin.
Note: You can’t disable an account if there are more than 100 active or inactive external USER PERMISSIONS
users associated with it. You must disable the users before disabling the account.
To view accounts:
1. Go to the Account detail page for the account you want to disable.
• Read on accounts
2. Click Manage External Account, then click Disable Customer Account.
To create or disable
3. Click OK to confirm. accounts:
If you decide to re-enable the account in the future, you can re-enable individual contacts as • Create on accounts
Customer Portal users. Re-enabling a contact for a Customer Portal creates a new customer portal To enable a customer
user record and role that is not associated with the previous customer portal user record and role. account:
You can’t restore deleted roles and groups. • Manage External Users
56
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Edit Customer Portal User Information
Edit Customer Portal User Information

To manage Customer Portal users: Edit Self-Service Users Available in: Salesforce
To manage profiles and permission sets: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets
orgs)
To create, edit, and delete page layouts: Customize Application
To set field-level security: Manage Profiles and Permission Sets Performance, Unlimited,
AND
Customize Application
To set sharing rules: Manage Sharing
You can edit Salesforce Customer Portal user information for contacts associated with accounts you have permission to access. To edit
information for a Customer Portal user:
2. Click Edit next to a user’s name.
3. Change the necessary information and click Save.
Tips for Editing Customer Portal User Information

Consider the following when editing Customer Portal user information:
• Create a custom list view to display only Customer Portal users by filtering on the Customer Portal Manager and Customer Portal
User license types. For example, use the criteria “License Type equals Customer Portal User, Customer Portal Manager.”
• When generating a new password for a user, the new password is automatically sent to the user’s email address and email verification
is not enforced.
• When changing a user’s email address to a new email address, email confirmation is enforced.
• Include the Customer Portal Welcome component on home page layouts assigned to Customer Portal users so that, upon logging
in to the portal, they receive a welcome message with their name. From the component, a user can change their own portal username,
password, locale, language, time zone, and contact information. When portal users change information about themselves, their user
record is updated but their contact record is not automatically updated with those changes.
57
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Reset Customer Portal User Passwords
Reset Customer Portal User Passwords

orgs)
If a Salesforce Customer Portal user loses his or her password, the user can click the Forgot your
password? link on the Customer Portal login page to have a new password emailed to him or her.
To reset a Customer Portal user's password: and Developer Editions
2. Select the checkbox next to the user’s name. Optionally, to change the passwords for all currently USER PERMISSIONS
displayed users, check the box in the column header to select all rows.
To reset Customer Portal
3. Click Reset Password. The user receives an email that contains a link and instructions to reset users' passwords:
the password. • Edit Self-Service Users
Tip: You can include the Customer Portal Welcome component on home page layouts
assigned to Customer Portal users. Each Customer Portal user who logs in to your portal
receives a welcome message with his or her name. The users can also change their own portal
username, password, locale, language, time zone, and contact information. When portal users
change information about themselves their user records are updated but their contact records
aren’t automatically updated with those changes.
58
Configure User Access to the Customer Portal Delegate Customer Portal User Administration and Portal
Super User
Delegate Customer Portal User Administration and Portal Super User

orgs)
You can delegate some administrative rights to Customer Portal users with the Customer Portal
Manager Custom user license. Delegated external user administrators can do the following for
external users, including both customer users and partner users, associated with their own account: and Developer Editions
• Create new external users
• Edit existing external users USER PERMISSIONS
• Reset passwords for external users
To manage Customer Portal
• Deactivate existing external users users:
Note: When a delegated external user admin deactivates a portal user, the admin doesn’t • Delegated External User
have the option to remove the portal user from teams that user is a member of. Administrator
To create, edit, and delete
Delegated external user administrators can also view their account’s detail page, along with contacts profiles:
and cases related to their account via the Accounts tab. In addition, delegated external user • Manage Profiles and
administrators receive the “Portal Super User” permission. This permission lets delegated external Permission Sets
user administrators do the following for their own account: To view and edit all cases
• View, edit, and transfer all cases and contacts for an account:
• Portal Super User
• Create cases for contacts
• View and edit all contacts, whether portal enabled or not
• View account details when they’re the contact on a case
• Report on all contacts, whether portal enabled or not, if the Reports tab is added to your Customer Portal and the user has the “Run
Reports” permission
You can add just the “Portal Super User” permission to the profiles of external users (except for high-volume portal users) so that they
have access to their account and can view and edit all of its cases and contacts without having the ability to manage other external
users. However, super users can’t view the Contacts tab on the Customer Portal without the Delegated External User Administrator
permission. To edit contacts, super users must select a contact from a case record. For more information, see:
Delegate External User Administration Rights

Note: You must use the original profile user interface to delegate administration rights for external users. If you’re using the
enhanced profile user interface, disable it temporarily in the User Interface settings to complete this procedure.
To delegate External User Administration Rights:
1. From Setup, enter Profiles in the Quick Find box, then select Profiles and click a custom Customer Portal profile.
You can’t add delegation rights or the “Portal Super User” permission to the standard Customer Portal Manager, Customer Portal
User, or High Volume Customer Portal profiles.
2. Click Edit.
3. Select Delegated External User Administrator.
59
Super User
When you select Delegated External User Administrator, the Portal Super User is automatically selected after you click Save.
4. Click Save.
5. In the Delegated External Users Profiles related list, click Edit.
6. Select the external user profiles you want users with this profile to be able to administer. An external user delegated administrator
can manage external users with Customer Portal, partner portal, or Communities profiles, as long as the users with the profile are
under the same account.
7. Click Save.
To change which profiles a delegated Customer Portal user administrator can edit:
2. Click Edit in the Delegated External User Profiles related list.
3. Select the external user profiles you want this profile to be able to administer.
4. Click Save.
Delegated Customer Portal administrators can perform the following tasks from a contact’s detail page:
• Click Enable Customer Portal User to allow a contact to use a Customer Portal.
• Click View Customer Portal User to view the Customer Portal user’s details. From a Customer Portal user’s detail page, delegated
Customer Portal users can:
– Click Edit to edit a Customer Portal user’s details.
– Click Reset Password to reset the Customer Portal user’s password.
– Click Edit and deselect the Active checkbox to deactivate the user.
Provide Users with the “Portal Super User” Permission

To provide users with the “Portal Super User” permission:
You can’t add the “Portal Super User” permission to the standard Customer Portal Manager, Customer Portal User, or High Volume
Customer Portal profiles.
2. Click Edit.
3. Select Portal Super User.
4. Click Save.
Tip: To report on profiles with the “Portal Super User” permission:

1. Note the names of profiles with the “Portal Super User” permission.
2. Select the Reports tab.
3. From the Administrative Reports folder, select the All Active Users report.
Tips on Setting Up Delegated Customer Portal User Administration

Consider the following when setting up delegated Customer Portal User Administration:
• On the profile of users you are granting delegated portal administration:
60
Super User
– Add the “Create” and “Edit” permissions on contacts so that delegated portal administrators and users with the “Portal Super
User” permission can create and update contacts related to their account.
– Set the Accounts and Contacts tab settings to Default On so that delegated portal administrators can view the Accounts and
Contacts tabs and easily manage contacts related to their accounts.
• Add the Accounts and Contacts tabs to your Customer Portal.

• Set field-level security and page layouts so that delegated Customer Portal user administrators and portal super users can only access
the account, contact, and case fields you specify.
Note: To allow portal super users to create cases for contacts other than themselves, set the field-level security on the
Contact Name field on cases to Editable.
• Customer Portal users are prevented from viewing related lists to objects they don’t have access to. For example, if a Customer Portal
user views a contact, and the contact page layout includes the Opportunities related list, the portal user can’t view the Opportunities
related list because portal users don’t have access to opportunities.
• Delegated Customer Portal user administrators can update portal users on any account to which they are transferred.
61
INDEX
Customer Portal (continued)

C user licenses 18
Customer Portal
custom objects 18
62

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Customer Portal Guide

Salesforce, Summer ’24

Last updated: March 18, 2024

What customer portals can I create with Salesforce? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Set Up Your Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Customize Your Customer Portal Tabs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Customize Your Customer Portal Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Configuring Multilingual HTML Messages for Customer Portals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Enable Single Sign-On for Portals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

What impact does Communities have on Customer Portal customers? . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

About High-Volume Portal Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

About Customer Portal User Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Configure User Access to the Customer Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Edit Customer Portal User Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Salesforce provides three ways to help you manage your customers.

Chatter Answers Salesforce Customer Portal Self-Service-Portal

Supported Record • Articles • Activities • Cases

Chatter Answers Salesforce Customer Portal Self-Service-Portal

• Community password • Portal username

b. Customize the fonts and colors.

c. Customize the available tabs and tab order.

b. Customize list views.

c. Customize search layouts.

6. Configure portal user access.

11. Enable contacts to use your portal.

Enable Your Customer Portal

Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors

Enable Your Customer Portal

Tips on Enabling the Customer Portal

Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

Considerations for the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

WHERE Type = 'RoleAndSubordinates') AND RowCause = 'Manual'

Use the Convert Portal User Access Wizard

Creating Multiple Customer Portals

Enable Customer Portal Login and Settings

Setting Description Available in: Enterprise,

Login Enabled Allows users to log in to the Customer Portal.

Note: Users must be able to log in to

Administrator Click the lookup icon ( ) to choose a

Portal Default Settings

Portal Default Settings

Email Notification Settings

Email Notification Settings

Look and Feel

Footer A text or HTML file that allows you to incorporate your

Look and Feel

4. Click Save to save your Customer Portal settings.

Customize Your Customer Portal Fonts and Colors

Tab Bar Background Background color behind all tabs.

Field Label Text Text color of the field names on records.

Link Text color of all links.

Field Separator Color of the lines that separate fields on records.

Separator Color of the lines between records on list views.

6. Click Save to save all changes to the theme values.

Customer Portal User Licenses and Custom Objects

Setup Tips and Considerations for Customer Portal Pages

Allowing Portal Users to View Web Tabs

Granting Portal Users Access to the Documents Tab

Allowing Portal Users to View the Reports Tab