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Aidan KeenanAidan Keenan 

Site.com OR Force.com OR Customer portal

Does anyone know what would be the best way to go as develop a page for a customer portal. Wheather to go with Sites.com or Force.com sites or Customer portal. I want to develop a client page in which allows the client to access a limited amount of information for example their client name, job orders etc.
Best Answer chosen by thisisnotapril
jmorse1.3929198985051208E12jmorse1.3929198985051208E12
Shane - The good news is that you don't have to choose either-or...you can do both. The go-forward strategy for this is to use Salesforce Communities (https://success.salesforce.com/_ui/core/chatter/groups/GroupProfilePage?g=0F9300000001og8CAA). Communities works a lot like the legacy customer portal, but also includes the ability to use Site.com to generate specific pages in the community, or to drive the entire community experience. I recently wrote a couple of relevant Developerforce blog articles that might help you:

Site.com + Communities = Like:
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/10/communities-plus-site-dot-com.html

Communities Containers:
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2014/01/communities-containers-options-for-building-salesforce-communities.html

All Answers

jmorse1.3929198985051208E12jmorse1.3929198985051208E12
Shane - The good news is that you don't have to choose either-or...you can do both. The go-forward strategy for this is to use Salesforce Communities (https://success.salesforce.com/_ui/core/chatter/groups/GroupProfilePage?g=0F9300000001og8CAA). Communities works a lot like the legacy customer portal, but also includes the ability to use Site.com to generate specific pages in the community, or to drive the entire community experience. I recently wrote a couple of relevant Developerforce blog articles that might help you:

Site.com + Communities = Like:
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2013/10/communities-plus-site-dot-com.html

Communities Containers:
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2014/01/communities-containers-options-for-building-salesforce-communities.html

This was selected as the best answer
Aidan KeenanAidan Keenan
Thanks for the reply, unfortunately my company does not have community licences but has many portal licences. Is there a workaround ?
desmoquattrodesmoquattro
All legacy portal licenses work with Communities, so there's no need to acquire new licenses. You will have to stand up a community to replace your portal to use the techniques I mentioned, but that's not very hard to do and will be very familiar to folks who have worked with portals. And both web properties (legacy portal and new community) can run alongside each other. So you have lots of good options here: build a VF page that will work with both your legacy portal and the new community, or move to communities and use Site.com to build a new page.
JeremyWJeremyW
I love this!    However I am confused why we can't publish a site into community in a sandbox!   This is't in the tech docs.  I found this out by asking support.    
desmoquattrodesmoquattro
It has to do with the design of Site.com. While you can use the studio in a sandbox, you cannot publish because sandboxes do not have the infrastructure to deploy Site.com's assets. This is intentional, because the Site.com studio was designed to be used in a production org. It has its own notions of preview and publish, which are meant to allow you and your content contributors to work right in the production org then publish pages and assets when they are ready.

If you think about it, the pages that Site.com produces really are just data. They're not like Visualforce pages or Apex code. And recall how we never propagate data forward from a sandbox to a production org, since doing so would violate good sandbox practices.

I realize that some folks have very legitimate use cases for publishing and testing in sandboxes with site.com. The line between data asset and code asset is being blurred with the addition of Site.com to communities. The Product Management team is aware of that, and is looking into designs that will make it easier for true developers to work in a sandbox in the future (content contributors and page assemblers should still always work in production...this is how many WCM systems work). In the meantime, recall that you can always export your Site.com site as a single .site file from the Site.com tab in your org. You can then overwrite (NOT import, but overwrite) it in production:
User-added image
NPlease note that I do NOT endorse this as a good regular practice. Much better to work on an unpublished community in production once you've built out the basics of the site you want to hand over to the folks who will maintain it.
JeremyWJeremyW
Thank you for the explanation!   I notice that all the salesforce.com communities are responsive.   However when I create a community in a sandox for a dev org, it is not responsive.   How is salesforce.com making these communties responsive?    
desmoquattrodesmoquattro
Portions of both the Success and Developer communities are implemented using a responsive framework like Bootstrap or Foundation (not sure exactly which one they use). Some pages in the community are driven by Visualforce, which is one option. You can also implement a responsive design in the same way using Site.com. But it's worth stepping back and considering the variety of mobile choices you have today when creating a Salesforce Community:
  • A browser-based Salesforce1 experience: This is easy...by simply checking a box on the user record ("Salesforce1 User"), you can give them a S1-style experience right in the browser. This is independent of any container choice you make for other devices and browsers. You can use tabs, you can use Visualforce, etc.
  • Implement a responsive design using Visualforce
  • Implement a responsive design using Site.com
  • Build a native mobile container and use any of the above.
Keep in mind that these choices are NOT mutually-exclusive. The blog post I referenced above goes into a bit more detail on the concept of containers.
http://blogs.developerforce.com/developer-relations/2014/01/communities-containers-options-for-building-salesforce-communities.html
JeremyWJeremyW
Thank you!     I set my salesforce1 option on my user record, however when I open it on my iphone, it's still the regular non responsive website.    But I am a sys admin.   

Also does this support secure HTTPS connections usting a custom URL?   Right now I think we can only have a secure.force.com address with https?   but what if I want a https://portal.medtexter.com ?    Can this be done with the new domain management?   

Thank you
desmoquattrodesmoquattro
Which browser did you use on the iPhone? I've had problems getting Chrome to be recognized, but not Safari. The product managers are aware of that.

In any event, in order to support a custom domain over HTTPS Salesforce would need to host your SSL certificate. The product management team is working on that (SAFE HARBOR APPLIES) for later this year. In the meantime, you might try simply redirecting your users from your custom domain into the community domain...treating your custom domain as an entry point for the community instead of the community's location.
JeremyWJeremyW
I am using Safari on my iphone.   I will create a user record and try it that way.   I loged into the portal using my sys admin login.  

That is awesome on the SSL!    
JeremyWJeremyW
Another question.   A lot of times we make min fiels from JS and CSS style sheets to speed up websites.  Does Sites.com do this for us automatically?  Also what about meta data on images? for SEO.    
desmoquattrodesmoquattro
Oh, I see what happened. You were using an internal license type. With internal licenses, you can connect the actual Salesforce1 native app. You need to use a user with an external license (e.g. a community user) to get the S1 browser experience.

As for minimized/compressed JS and CSS, the ones Salesforce provides should already be that way. But you can compress your own text files as well. The studio won't automatically do it for you.
John KlokJohn Klok

Site.com, force.com, Customer portals are all used for developing portals for the customers. The best solution we recommend is CRM Jetty: Customer Portal Solutions. Talking about the customer portal, it is a website designed for the customers to access the services and information they need. Using a customer portal for your business gives you the personalized look and all the integrations and systems you want. This helps you to develop a portal according to all the requirements you need. It also provides various other services that are important for the business. It provides full security for payment gateways. 

To know more about the custom customer portal and its solutions you can visit here.