As a Salesforce Gold Partner, we at GravityInfoSolutions love to work with a wide range of Salesforce solutions. Among other things, our team of technical consultants specializes in Cloud Marketing, Sales Cloud, and Communities. As a Salesforce Development company in New York, communities happen to be one of our favorite offerings to work with and implement, as they’re rich in features, and they can quickly help connect a business to its customers and vice versa.
Licensing: Different Editions & Types
Salesforce licensing for external community users comes in three main editions: Customer, Partner and Lightning External. And within each edition, there are two types: Member-Based and Login-Based.
Customer (aka Self-Service) – This is one of the minimum needed aspect for external access and collaboration, but even without specific licenses, external people can still have some entree to a community. A support portal would be the prime example here for when you want users to be able to create a case and access learning articles.
Partner – This is specifically designed for B2B intercommunications where one wants to pull in sales data as well. It is nothing but a PRM (Partner Relationship Management) license.
Lightning External – This one here offers a very custom experience for almost anyone and everyone accessing. This is used to create a customer forum, or to display data external to Salesforce, or to build full enterprise portals that handle everyone-customers.
Note: Technically, both Customer and Lightning External have two options each themselves – Standard and Plus which are used to allow further granularity for accessing different objects in the Org.
The Types
Member-Based – Much like the other standard Salesforce license types - it’s generally a higher fixed monthly amount per license, and the user who is assigned with it can log in as many times as they want to.
Login-Based –This one is best for those external users who might only login only 1-3 times a month, just for a purpose to check something. Here, the purchasing is different, too - the client company of the Salesforce Development Company in New York purchases a number of logins per month and the users assigned to this license type consume one of these logins each day they sign-in. The way the licenses showing up in one’s Org is also unique: it’s basically a 1 to 20 ratio. So, if one purchases 1,000 logins per month, the org will get provisioned 20,000 login licenses that he/she can assign to specific users.
