Many companies choose to roll out both an internal and external community at the same time because the incremental work to add additional community is minimal. That being said, if I were to choose one over the other I would start with the customer community.

• Customer communities are easier to get started because you start with a much larger audience and often the bigger the community the more vibrant it is.
• Customer communities are often more homogeneous. For example Dell, Starbucks, and Salesforce have one big community for their customers, where as when you roll out Ideas internally you often have to gather specific requirements and use cases from each department or division.
• The final reason customer communities are often more successful is that customers typically don't have a channel to voice ideas or gain insight into the initiatives your companies are working on. If an employee has a really good idea they can often walk the halls and network to find the right person to pitch it to.

If you have experience rolling out these types of communities, or a follow on question, post a comment below.

 With the Customer Portal and Partner Portal, companies want to customize the UI to match the look and feel of their corporate website.

Point and Click Customization

The simplest approach is to use the tools provided in the Portal Setup area of the application to pick your fonts, colors, HTML header and footer, tabs and sidebar components. Since it is point and click customization it is very easy and there is no risk of things breaking.

Cascading Style Sheets

While you can go a long way with this approach, some companies want to take it a step further and apply their own Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This approach is a little bit more technical, but it is a skill set that most web developers are familiar with. By injecting CSS into the HTML header and footer you can gain much greater control over the UI. There is some level of risk that comes along with this customization. For example, if new features are added during the seasonal releases, they could break your CSS. Therefore, we recommend that you test your CSS in the pre-release environment to catch any bugs that might have been introduced. We also recommend that you are careful about how far you take your customization. For example, if you re-arrange the elements on the page you increase the likelihood that things could break badly vs. if you just change how they are styled. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: Check out What's New in The Winter '09 Release

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

CRM Users
If you want to extend Salesforce Ideas to your CRM users, it’s just another tab in the application. Your users can navigate to it using the AppExchange drop down or you can add it to your default tab set. In the screenshot below you’ll notice a small promo in the right hand column just below the search box. This is a simple HTML homepage component and a great way to promote your internal community.

When your users click on the Ideas Tab they will see your internal Ideas community. Note that if you are also using Salesforce Ideas in the customer portal, they will also have the option of toggling over to the portal view to see ideas your customers have published.

Managing duplicate ideas can be tricky but it is an important part of improving the experience.

Three Ways to Catch Duplicate Ideas

• Suggested Duplicates - Catch duplicates before they are submitted.
• Report Duplicates - Enlist the community to help you identify duplicates.
• Merge Ideas - Clean up duplicates while retaining the original ideas for reference and reporting integrity.

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?

Dell has an internal community called Dell EmployeeStorm. They use it as a tool to generate innovative ideas and capture feedback from their 80,000 employees. Employees can submit ideas, vote on things they like, and add comments. In the first 60 days following the EmployeeStorm launch Dell generated over 3k ideas and 48k votes. They have created a direct line to their employees regardless of where they sit within the organization.

We've had other companies have expressed interest in creating specialized internal Salesforce Idea communities. For example, one customer wanted to create a community for Sales Advice and Success Stories to help identify what was working on the front lines. With Salesforce Ideas you could quickly get up to speed by browsing the top ideas and reading through the comments. Since everything is fully indexed you could also search to see what you can find on a given topic.

Related Posts; Capturing Feedback on Your CRM Rollout, Dell's Best Practice Session at Dreamforce, Dell Customer Snapshot, Salesforce.com's Internal Rollout of Ideas

IdeaStorm and IdeaExchange are two examples of public Salesforce Ideas communities. They live out on the web, visible to Customers, Press, Analysts, or Prospects to see. This model offers the lowest barriers so generally these communities have lots of activity. For example Dell has had seven thousand votes and a half a million votes in the first 6 months. People link to this content and it gets picked up in search which in turn can generate leads. There is also a huge PR value if you can harness a vibrant community of customer evangelist.

While we are going to work towards public sites, the current product is focused on private sites for customers, partners and employees. This model is similar to Facebook or Netflix, where you might have some teaser information on the registration page, but to engage with the community you have to login.

There are at least three ways to use your landing page to entice your users to login. The first is through good old marketing. You can create static content which introduces the community, the key value proposition, and how it works. That's what they've done in the Netflix example below.

The next approach would be to incorporate a blog into your registration page. On your blog you can highlight interesting posts from your community, profile top contributors, and talk about ideas your company has acted upon. People could subscribe to your blog to get updates on what's going on and maybe you could even present a question of the week. If your looking for a good on-demand blogging application I'd recommend talking a look at typepad or wordpress, both are great applications.

The third approach to teasing information is to use the Salesforce API to pull out the top ideas and present them on your registration page. This approach requires a little development work, but it is relatively easy as long as you limit the scope to a couple of views, say your recent and popular ideas.

These three approaches should all work pretty well and will allow you to get your feet wet. Once again if you are excited about the idea of public sites and want to see us build it natively on the platform, vote it up on the IdeaExchange.

There are three broad categories of users within a Salesforce Ideas Community; administrators, moderators, and end users. Each have a different set of permissions.