Portal Roles Salesforce for Customers and Partners
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Salesforce Portal Roles can also be called Customer or Partner Portal Roles and are considered an essential feature by the Salesforce community. It offers many benefits to organizations that have to share Salesforce Experience Cloud data with users such as customers, employees, and partners in a secure manner.
One of the advantages of using Salesforce Portal Roles is that it can control who can access your portal that contains private content. This feature lets you choose which Salesforce records and objects are visible and even editable to users. With access control sorted from Salesforce Portal Roles, you can rest assured that users only view and access content that is defined by you and meant for them.
Do you want to know more about what are the roles in Salesforce? Join us as we dive into exploring Salesforce’s ultimate feature for portals.
Salesforce Portal Roles: Types of Roles in Salesforce
What are roles in Salesforce? Roles encompass the different user profiles that exist in your portal. Roles are often assigned an access level, determining what is visible or hidden to users on your portal. There are many roles that can exist for a Salesforce portal. We provide two popular examples of roles below:
Guest Users
This role in Salesforce is assigned to any user visiting your portal who wants to avoid logging in. Guest users will have minimal access to your portal and can only access content that you assign to be public. A guest user must log into your profile to switch to a different role type. The role type allocated to the user will determine which content they can access on your portal.
Authenticated Users
Users who log into your portal and are identified take on the authenticated user role type. Authenticated users can access features and data hidden from guest users. Still, they have limited access to the content you have allowed them to view.
Other types of roles that exist for Salesforce portals include customer or partner community user, high-volume customer portal user, and high-volume portal user. And that’s Salesforce roles explained 
Salesforce Roles vs Profiles
So, what’s the difference between roles and profiles in Salesforce? Well, roles and profiles are both used for managing user access and permissions as they control what your Salesforce users can view and access within the platform. Roles and profiles, therefore, are essential for keeping confidential data protected. But they do have unique differences.
Profiles
Roles
It’s best to work with roles and profiles together when setting up access control for Salesforce. Just keep in mind that profiles define the baseline permissions for all users under a specific category like job function. Whereas roles control which users can access records that are owned by different users.
What is the Role of a Salesforce Administrator?
Salesforce administrators are responsible for managing an organization’s Salesforce platform. Their range of duties includes many tasks, ensuring all users work effectively within Salesforce.
For example, one of their critical responsibilities is user management. To successfully manage users on Salesforce, administrators take on duties that include creating and managing user accounts, profiles, and roles. Salesforce administrators have the power to grant or deny users access and permissions based on roles that they fill in an organization.
Salesforce Partner Roles: How to Create Portal Roles in Salesforce
Portal roles are needed to determine access control and permissions for customers, employees, or partners who will be the users of your Salesforce portal or community. How to create partner roles in Salesforce? Let’s examine the steps that Salesforce administrators use to create portal roles:
Salesforce | Roles & Permissions
We discussed roles versus profiles earlier, but what about roles and permissions in Salesforce? We haven’t finished just yet. Here are a few notes on roles and permissions in Salesforce to learn about.
Roles, as we mentioned before, are hierarchical structures in Salesforce that show the reporting lines of a business. Roles follow a top-to-bottom structure where the higher-level roles have the most access and visibility to Salesforce data. The lower-level roles will have more restrictions on what they can access within Salesforce. So, for example, executives of a company will have access to more Salesforce data than sales representatives.
Salesforce administrators use permission sets to give certain users or groups permissions. This is a valuable feature since the administrator does not have to change the profile to assign the permission sets. An everyday use case for this task is when administrators give a new team access to only certain Salesforce objects and features without the need to edit the overall profile settings.
Salesforce Roles | Best Practices
Before we wrap up this article, we would like to give you a few best practice tips on defining roles in Salesforce. It’s important to have a list of best practices as they can ensure your data is secure and compliant. Additionally, it helps everyone be more efficient with Salesforce. Here are some best practice tips regarding roles:
Design your Salesforce Role Hierarchy
First, you always want to create a well-organized role hierarchy that mirrors the structure of your business. You will give the higher roles in the hierarchy access to more Salesforce data and features compared to the roles lower down on the hierarchy. Make sure your role hierarchy is not too complex with many roles as this will become difficult to manage in Salesforce.
Set up Profiles and Permissions
Next, you want to create profiles that have permissions for all users within a role or category. A good idea would be to create permission sets, as these can contain extra permissions and can be given to users who need them. They are useful when you do not want to change profiles. Just pay attention to the Modify All or View All permissions. These permissions can grant users excessive access to Salesforce data.
FAQ
Here are three bonus questions and answers from our Titan archives related to Salesforce portal roles.
What are Portal roles in Salesforce?
They are configurations that define permissions and access control for users who visit your Salesforce portal or community.
What is the role hierarchy in the Partner Portal Salesforce?
The Partner Portal in Salesforce has three roles in this hierarchy: Partner User, Partner Manager, and Partner Executive.
What are the benefits of the Salesforce portal?
It lets you understand your customers, employees, and partners better. You can also analyze their data on the portal to realize their opinions and behaviors.
The Best Way to Work with Salesforce
Portals are everywhere online, and creating Salesforce ones is essential for elevating your customer experiences. We hope we shed some light on how roles, profiles, and permissions fit into Salesforce portals.
If you are looking to extend your Salesforce Cloud experiences further than customer and partner portals, we suggest you check out Titan. Our no-code Salesforce platform has powerful tools and features to streamline your workflow processes in Salesforce and keep your employees focused on high-level tasks. If you need more information, please feel free to reach out to us on one of our social media channels below.
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