With the Winter '08 release we are also going to make Salesforce Ideas available through the portal so that you can expose it to customers and partners. Create a customized, fully branded portal delivering the stellar user experience. You can even customize the login page to fit within your corporate website. Once inside customers will be able to post, vote, and comment on ideas.

There are lots of different ways you can use Salesforce Ideas for customers and partners, it's really about how you frame the discussion. The most popular use case that comes up is product feedback and feature requests.

At Salesforce we use to have our customers log cases when they wanted to suggest a feature. The process worked well enough, but we had thousands of cases to de-dupe, categorize, and respond to. From the customer perspective, logging a case is a bit of a black hole. You might get a templatized  response but you're often left frustrated by the experience. With IdeaExchange we asked our customers to post their feature requests online. If other customers voted on their idea, they felt validated, and if they might realize it doesn't have broad appeal. Just as valuable as the votes, are the comments an idea receives. Customers will often jump in and validate the idea or offer their two cents. You'll also get dialogs where people suggest work arounds and partner products they've had success with.

For Product Managers the IdeaExchange has been incredibly valuable. They can monitor their category to see what new ideas customers are suggesting and as often is the case they'll respond to the community to provide some insight or ask for more details. The ideas are ranked by the community, and the Product Manager can run reports and dashboards to analyze the data. Since IdeaExchange is linked back to your CRM data you can run reports to see exactly what type of customer voted for a given idea.

There are lots of other use cases for Private Customer Communities. How do you want to leverage Salesforce Ideas?