Salesforce Features
Customer Portal
Embrace Your Customers
In General Release with Summer ’07 – Enterprise and Unlimited Editions; Requires an Additional Fee
• Elevate the self-service experience with a fully customizable portal
• Share any data, any application, any Web service
• Empower your entire organization to engage with customers
Summer ’07 ushers in a new era of customer self-service with the general availability of the highly anticipated Salesforce Customer Portal (formerly known as AppSpace). Everyone in your company can truly collaborate with your customers in the secure, branded, online Customer Portal. In addition to resolving customer service and support inquiries, your customers can also use the portal to interact with other departments in your company, such as project management, billing, delivery/fulfillment, and more. With a fully customizable user interface and the ability to easily share data and applications with customers, the Customer Portal helps you deliver the stellar customer experience that you envision.
Training and Documentation
Feature Details
• Multiple Personalized Portals: You can create multiple personalized portals for any customer segment. Set up uniquely branded portals customized to the needs of distinct customer groups or VIP customers, or product-specific portals to engage customers of each product. Alternatively, you can enable customers to log on to the distinctly branded portals of your multiple business units, while you maintain a single customer database. With personalized portals, you can create as many unique experiences as your business model requires.
• Self-Resolution with Suggested Solutions: Automatically display matching solutions when a customer creates a case through the portal, and guide the user to close the case if one of the solutions solves the problem. With suggested solutions, you can accelerate the resolution of customer issues while allowing your agents to focus on more complex issues.
• My Profile: Streamline the customer experience by allowing portal users to update their own user profiles. Portal users can view and edit their user and contact information, thus reassuring both you and your users that their information is accurate and up to date.
• New Internal User Group: A new default sharing group strengthens confidentiality by allowing you to easily share data with your employees only. Customer Portal users are automatically excluded when you choose the “Roles and Internal Subordinates” option in sharing rules. In addition, when you first roll out the Customer Portal and wish to set all your data as internal-confidential by default, an easy-to-use wizard helps you automatically choose this option across all your sharing rules.
• Additional Custom Branding: With Summer ’07, you can customize the look and feel of your pages for log-in, forget password and change password pages so that your own branding and messaging is included. In addition, with the enhanced style editor, you can easily select the color scheme of your Customer Portal and see the changes in preview mode before they are made.
Note: The Salesforce Customer Portal is a fee-based license option that is available for Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers. To activate or learn more about the Customer Portal, contact your salesforce.com representative.

10 Comments
July 5
Dear Sirs
Our company the Wakatobi Dive Resort has been using SalesForce.com for several years.
We are interested in upgrading our service to incorporate the Customer Portal feature.
For the purpose we would like to know how much does that cost and how to implement it?
Thank you.
Rai S. Regawa
July 6
Where are the reporting enhancements?
July 6
integration of multiple custom portals with signle signon solutions will be a big issue. Any info on how that is supposed to work?
From what I have read, we need to export each SSP user's unique URL and store it in our LDAP.
Have I got that right?
Why can't this be stored at the SF side and served when the user logs on to the portal via a central SF URL?
July 7
I second my colleague Rai's comment and wonder why you guys have not gotten back to us with any information or pricing!!?>???
July 9
Unless pricing is made transparent, few SF customers are going to use this. I find the constant hiding of pricing by SF to be an obstacle to doing business with it.
July 9
Hi Rai,
Glad to hear you are interested in the Customer Portal. Pricing starts at $5 per user and volume discounts apply.
In terms of implementation, there is an implementation guide available http://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_customer_portal_implementation_guide.pdf
Please contact your Salesforce account manager who will be able to get you activated with the customer portal.
Kind regards,
Chet Chauhan
Senior Product Manager,
Salesforce.com
July 16
In your pricing is a "user" mean a customer? If we have 1000 customers, does that mean $5000 per month? I agree with Ollie that SF often makes it very hard to find pricing.
Cheers
Max
July 18
Does anyone know if the new customer portal will include a forum or community capability?
July 19
Katherine, that is an interessting question. On the picture you can find a button labeled "Community". But I have no idea what you'll find when you click on it. Does anyone knwo if there will be blogs and forums etc.?
July 21
Here Here,
Salesforce, listen up, stop milking your customers and hiding pricing.
I am looking into switching to the Open source CRM sugar crm.
Grrrr....