Platform Users
Some of your employees might need access to Salesforce Ideas, but might not need access to CRM functionality like leads and opportunities. For these users you can buy platform licenses. As you can see below we’ve reduced the tabs down to Home, Ideas, Reports, and Dashboards. You could simplify it further if you wanted to just Home and Ideas. In the screenshot below you can see how we’ve created a custom homepage to introduce the community and highlights key metrics. 

When your platform users click on the Ideas Tab they'll have the exact same view as your CRM users.

Moderators, Administrators, and Project Managers
Below is an example of a custom dashboard. You can track the trending of ideas over time, your most active discussions, and your top users. If you are using ideas in the customer portal you can also create reports to slice and dice the data to see what types of customers are voting for a given idea.

You might want to take your top ideas and turn them into projects so you can assign them a project team and make sure they are seen through to fruition.

Customer Portal
If you want to give customers and partners access to Salesforce Ideas you can do so through the custom portal. As you can see you can go a long way towards customizing the look and feel to match your business. In the example below we’ve created a custom homepage introducing the community. If you have different types of customers, you could even create a different homepage for each profile if you wanted to.

When your customers click on the Ideas Tab they will have the same view of the application as your employees, except they'll only be able to see ideas that have been posted to the customer portal.

Download a PowerPoint Presentation with all these screeshots