What is Salesforce Experience Cloud, and when is a portal worth building?

Salesforce Experience Cloud builds portals and sites on top of your CRM data — customer self-service, partner and distributor portals, member and resident sites. A portal is worth building when it removes work from your team or friction from your channel, and the licence maths decides whether it pays.

Decide the sharing model first

Portal projects fail on the sharing and security model, not on design. Who can see which record has to be decided and tested before any page is designed. Ignyto builds a test matrix of every user type against every object and record type and walks it with you — unglamorous, and the reason our portals do not leak data between accounts.

Then the licence maths

Licensing is usually the largest single cost in a portal programme, so it gets modelled against real user numbers before anything is committed.

• External identity — login and profile, cheapest, suitable where a user only needs their own records.
• Customer community — cases, orders, documents and knowledge, restricted to their own account.
• Partner community — leads, opportunities and performance for a distributor’s own territory. The expensive one, so modelled first.

What people actually build

• Customer self-service — case submission, order and job status, document access. Skipton International’s mortgage portal works this way, with two-factor authentication and full mobile use.
• Partner and distributor portals — Ellab’s global distributors manage their own pipeline from leads through to opportunities without full Salesforce licences.
• Application and admissions hubs — Dukes Education runs agent and parent portals feeding one application hub across a network of colleges.

Lock down guest access

Guest user profiles need restricting properly rather than left at default. It is the most common security finding in an inherited portal, and it is straightforward to fix before launch.

Common questions