The Need for a Customer Portal
In November 2012 we received a call from Huong Nguyen of Shiloh Event Creations asking
if Snapptraffic Consulting could help her configure the standard customer
portal that is available through Salesforce.com. Huong has an event planning
business and wanted to move the management of her event planning business into
Salesforce.com, but she also wanted to distinguish her company from the
competition by providing her customers a portal in which they follow along real
time with the planning of their event.
Huong had already considered several project management
solutions available on the app exchange and was close to buying one of those.
Before doing so, however, she wanted to be sure that certain details of a
project could be made visible through the Salesforce.com customer portal. She
was asking for our help to determine if it was possible to show to her customers some important aspects of
the project (from a third-party application), but to keep other items concealed.
Building an Application rather than Buying Off-the-shelf
We discussed these goals with Huong and suggested that instead
of buying a project management system, we build inside of Salesforce.com, using
the standard tools provided, the various databases that would be necessary to
track her event milestones, assignments, the budget, various charges, invoices,
and payments. This approach would have the advantage of a system built according
to her existing processes - and further, once the development was complete, the
system would belong to Shiloh Event Creations and there would be no further
subscriptions for a third-party project management application.
We also discussed options for the portal itself. While the
standard portal provided by Salesforce.com is easy to setup and modify, it
didn’t provide the look and feel that Huong was hoping for.
After talking through all the options, she decided that a
custom portal with a design based on her existing website would be the best
approach. A custom portal doesn’t use the portal system provided by
Salesforce.com at all, but is built on Salesforce.com Sites and uses the
authentication of a customer portal license. This approach would also permit us
to take full advantage of the project management system that we would build in
lieu of the App Exchange offering.
Another important decision in our planning process was to
build as much of the system using custom objects (databases) rather than
standard objects like Opportunities and Products. Using custom objects means
that many of the future internal users of her system would be able to login
using Platform licenses. Platform
licenses are significantly less expensive than full Salesforce.com Enterprise licenses.
With those choices made we kicked off the project by
conducting a business process review in which we noted how Shiloh Event
Creations currently planned for and executed the events that they were
managing. We discussed how work was scheduled, assigned, and completed. We also
talked extensively about the financial side of event planning.
After these conversations we had this sketch from which to
work to create the data model in Salesforce.com.
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| The Shiloh Event Creation Data Model Sketch |
We immediately began creating the custom objects (databases)
in Salesforce.com, adding the fields, and configuring the page layouts. In just
a couple of days, Shiloh Event Creations had a fully functioning Project
Management System in Salesforce.com built to their exact work requirements.
Even if the portal was never built, this was an impressive advance in the
management of Shiloh Event Creations business processes.
The next step was to design the custom portal. For
inspiration, we looked at their existing company website, noted the design, the
styles, the colors, etc and began sketching a portal with these concepts in
mind.
Here is one of our actual sketches from the design process:
This was the longest part of the project, but during these
planning sessions we sketched out all the various pages of the Shiloh Event
Creations portal. Once that was complete, the development began. The
Snapptraffic Consulting development team went to work analyzing the data model,
the application already built in salesforce.com, the sketches, the existing
website style, and the project requirements – all in the context of the end
goal. After that we started writing code!
Over the next few weeks we would meet with Huong every few
days to review our progress, take her inputs for changes, and continue
development of the requested pages. Here are some screenshots of the final
result:
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| The Portal Login Page |
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| A Detail Page from the Portal of a Shiloh project |
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| A Typical Page from the Portal |
Hopefully this case study gives you a feel for how the
development of a custom portal built on the Salesforce.com platform can
proceed. Thinking about a custom portal for your company? Call us at
800-422-6490 or visit us at www.snapptraffic.com
to speak to us about your project.
