Reports for Salesforce.com Partner Portal Users

Want to drive yourself crazy? Try figuring out why your Salesforce Partner Portal Users can't view reports. It won't be the obvious things.

- You'll try looking at the report folder permissions, ensuring that partner portal users are selected. Okay, that was easy, but it didn't work.
- Next you'll confirm which profile your partner portal users are on and go look at that profile to ensure that they have general user permission to view reports. Alright, got that set - still "Insufficient Privileges"
- You check the salesforce partner portal settings and ensure that they have the report tab turned on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was - still no reports.
- And finally you ensure that the sharing model doesn't prevent them from seeing the data in the report. No joy.

Then what else could you possibly check? What else is there to check? Certainly nothing obvious.

Well that is where I found myself recently, having checked everything I could think of. I searched Google for Salesforce Partner Portal Reports and after looking through about 20 links, came across an exchange on the salesforce.com forums where a user realized what the issue was and mentioned it.

As it turns out, salesforce.com is "expecting" you to be in a private sharing model with regard to your partner portal users and their use of reports. Meaning, they built things thinking that is how you would be using the system. Therefore, even if you are in an open sharing model, all the way down to your partner portal users, if they run a report that includes records that they do not own, they will receive an "Insufficient Privileges" error.

According to the sharing model, they should have no problem viewing these records, but since they don't own the records and have not had the records explicitly shared with them through a sharing rule - they get that error.

I don't quite get why, maybe someone who understands this more thoroughly can explain, but in a nutshell, in order to grant partner portal users permission to view reports, you must:

1) make the sharing model PRIVATE, then
2) use a sharing rule to grant them visibility over the records in the object that is being reported on.

I know, go figure. Didn't make sense to me. But it worked.

If you need help on any salesforce.com issue, feel free to contact me at www.snapptraffic.com. Our consulting services at Snapptraffic Consulting are geared towards helping the salesforce.com customer get the most out of their system. From troubleshooting to full scale implementation and development - we can help.