With the Winter '09 release you have a couple of new options with regards to sharing. When you create a community you can designate whether it's associated with one portal, all portals, or no portals. You can then create profiles which map to the communities. For example;

• Profile 1 - Access to Portal A
• Profile 2 - Access to Portal B
• Profile 3 - Access to Portal C
• Profile 4 - Access to Portal A & B
• Profile 5 - Access to Portal A & C
• Profile 6 - Access to Portal B & C

You can see how this gets exponentially more complex the more communities you have, so if you can it is best to default to a more open sharing model if you can.

The approach of associating portals to profiles doesn't work for CRM users. CRM users have visibility into everything or nothing.

We realize the importance of robust/ad-hock sharing, so we are going to invest heavily here over the next couple of releases. We posted an idea to the IdeaExchange so if sharing is something that's important to you cast your vote and provide us more detail on how you'd like to see us build it.

One of the most visible improvements with the Winter '09 release are the new profile pages. When you visit the Ideas tab is says Welcome

With the Winter '09 release we added validation rules on comments. The most common use case for validation rules is to catch obscene comments and present the user with a custom warning message. The customer will have to maintain a list of words and define the warning message that is returned by the user.

In the past we use the alias field to identify members of the community. The alias field worked fine for internal use, but when dealing with customer communities you might not want to unveil your identity (Alias uses first initial, last name by default) and you might want to use a nickname larger than 8 characters (the limit for Alias). With the Winter '09 release we've eliminated those constraints and let users choose their own nickname as part of the self-registration process.

The other way people want to improve data quality is to have people from the community flag duplicate ideas. While this isn't part of the ideas product we've seen some very slick examples of how the log a case feature can be used to identify duplicates and reports of abuse. The case functionality in Salesforce is very robust so you can create queues for moderators, set escalation rules, and create great dashboards. If you're interested in exploring this direction contact Salesforce.com Professional Services.

Another low tech approach to this is to create a side bar promo that says, "To Report Abuse or Flag Duplicates Simply Add a Comment to the Idea In Question and Our Moderators will Follow Up." On the back end you can create a report or workflow rule to notify moderators when report abuse or flag duplicate comments are left. Once you're moderator has delt with the issue they can delete the comment.

In the community it's important that the moderators and product experts stand out. If someone is posting a reply you want to know if it's an official voice from the community.

To designate individuals as experts, you first have to assign them to a public group within Salesforce. Start by going to... Setup > Manage Users > Public Groups When you create a new group you can give it a name, and define membership based upon other groups, roles, or individual users. Once you've defined your group you'll then want to go to... Setup > Customize > Ideas > Communities And there you'll be able to edit your community and assign an Expert Group.

Salesforce has an expert icon out of the box (seen below), but if you want to use a different icon, maybe a company logo, it can be swapped out using CSS.

With the Winter '09 release you can either vote an idea up, or demote it.

On the back end you can report on the sheer number of votes, the aggregate vote score, or who voted an idea up vs. down. To see all the down votes, filter for vote_value > 0. To see all the up votes, filter for vote_value < 0.

In the past you could associate an idea with one category, but often times it isn't clear exactly which category it belongs in. It might be relevant to 2 or 3 categories and you want to make sure all the right people see it. With Winter '08 your users can tag ideas with multiple categories.

In the Winter '09 release you will be able to create status flags and sort ideas by status.

In the past you might have used custom fields as a quick and dirty solution, but now it is much more prominent, and much easier for end users to sort by status. For example, you might want to go to the IdeaExchange and search for all the "Ideas Under Consideration" within the "Salesforce Ideas" category.

The status field is not turned on by default, but it's easy to get set up.