Create a Partner Portal, Enable Partner Account and Users, and Add Members

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series. This clip starts at the 1:50 minute mark, in case you want to rewind and watch the beginning of the step again.

Create a Partner Portal

Ursa Major’s first step in expanding its business with partner resellers is sharing pertinent CRM data with partners. Maria, the Ursa Major system administrator, wants to create a partner portal using Experience Cloud to make data sharing a breeze.

First she takes a peek at this video to understand how portals, communities, sites, and their users live within the Salesforce org.

Now Maria starts setting up a partner portal. Take these steps in your Trailhead Playground.

Click the Setup icon, then select Setup.
In the Quick Find box, enter Digital Experiences, then select Settings.
Select Enable Digital Experiences. Your digital experiences domain is shown. It includes your My Domain name in the format MyDomainName.my.site.com for production orgs.
Click Save, then OK.

Next, change the number of partner roles to two. We touch on what this means later in the project, but it’s essential to make this change now.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, then select Settings.
Under Role and User Settings, increase the number of partner roles to 2.
Click Save.

Now that you’ve enabled digital experiences and increased the number of partner user roles, set up a bare-bones partner portal. You should have been redirected to the All Sites page in Setup, but if not, refresh the page, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, and select All Sites.

Click New. The creation wizard appears with different template options for you to choose from.
Select the Partner Central template (not the Enhanced Partner Central template).
Click Get Started.
Name the site Ursa Major.
Add UrsaMajor to the end of the URL so that the final URL ends with /UrsaMajor.
Click Create.

Your portal is now in Preview status, which means that what you’ve created isn’t in the world yet. Take a quick look around. This is Experience Workspaces, and you'll be coming back here soon to customize and administer your portal.

Image of a bare bones portal.

After you enable digital experiences in your org, Salesforce adds specific actions to your Account and Contact page layouts in Lightning Experience so that you can create partner accounts and partner users. Check to see if you have Enable as Partner in the quick actions dropdown menu on your Account and Contact pages.

In Experience Workspaces, click Workspaces in the navigation bar and select Salesforce Setup.
On the Setup page, from the App Launcher, select Accounts.
Select the All Accounts list view and click any account.
On the account page, click the dropdown arrow in the top navigation to see the quick actions menu, which includes all the available quick actions for that page.
If you see Enable as Partner, skip to Enable Partner Accounts and Create Partner Users.

If you don’t see Enable as Partner, follow these steps.

From Setup, click Object Manager.
Click Account | Page Layouts | Account Layout.
In the page layout editor, click Mobile & Lightning Actions. (You may need to click the wrench icon first to override customizations in the Lightning & Mobile Actions section.)
Drag the Enable as Partner and Disable Partner Account buttons to the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section.
Click Quick Save.

Now add the partner user buttons to the Contact page layout.

From Setup, click Object Manager.
Click Contact | Page Layouts | Contact Layout.
In the page layout editor, click Mobile & Lightning Actions.
Drag the Enable Partner User button to the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section.
Click Quick Save.

Enable Partner Accounts and Create Partner Users

Now you can enable a couple of accounts as partner accounts. In your Trailhead Playground, enable Edge Communications and Express Logistics and Transport as partner accounts.

From the App Launcher, select Accounts.
Select the All Accounts list view.
Click Edge Communications.
Click the dropdown arrow for the quick actions menu.
Select Enable as Partner.
In the confirmation dialog, click Enable As Partner.

Repeat these steps for Express Logistics and Transport.

Now that you’ve created partner accounts, you can convert their contacts to partner users. Partner users are Salesforce users who have access to CRM objects, such as Opportunities, Leads, and Campaigns. Partner users can log in to a portal to access and modify the Salesforce data that you share with them.

Before you create partner users, ensure that the admin user (you in your Trailhead Playground) has a role assigned.

In Setup, enter Users in the Quick Find box and select Users.
Click Edit next to your user and assign yourself any role you’d like. Go for CEO… why not? (If you’re not sure of your user name in your Trailhead Playground, click the profile icon in the navigation bar to see the name.)
Click Save.

When you’re setting up partner users, the best practice is to clone the Partner Community User profile and go through all the user permissions with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that all the settings are as you wish. For the purposes of this project, follow these steps so that you can use standard external profiles to create partner users.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box and select Settings.
Select the checkbox for Allow using standard external profiles for self-registration, user creation, and login.
Click OK and then Save.

Communities licenses are used in Experience Cloud sites.

Now head to Accounts.

Click the App Launcher and select Accounts.
Click Edge Communications.
Click Sean Forbes from the Contacts related list.
From the quick actions dropdown menu, select Enable Partner User.
Change the following in the New User detail page.

Email: [Enter your email address so you can get login information for your newly created users.]
Username: [Enter a unique username in an email format]
User License: Partner Community
Profile: Partner Community User.
Deselect Salesforce CRM Content User.
Deselect Receive Salesforce CRM Content Email Alerts.
Select the Generate new password and notify user immediately checkbox.
Click Save and OK.

Follow the same steps for these other contact records.

Rose Gonzalez (in Edge Communications)
Babara Levy (in Express Logistics and Transport)
Josh Davis (in Express Logistics and Transport)

Add Profiles to Your Portal’s Membership

Now that you’ve created a basic portal, enabled partner accounts, and created partner users, you’re ready to add members to your portal.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, then select All Sites.
Click Workspaces next to the Ursa Major portal.
Click Administration | Members.
To add members using profiles:

Select the Partner Community User and Customer Community User profiles. (If you don’t see the profiles, change the search to All.)
Click Add.
Click Save.

Since you chose to generate a password and send an email to your members, you should receive a welcome email. Didn’t get a welcome email? It probably means that your portal is still unpublished and in preview mode. Let’s fix that.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, then select All Sites.
Click Builder next to the Ursa Major portal.
On the portal page, click Publish, and in the confirmation dialogue, click Publish again. Then click Got It in the next confirmation dialogue.
Click to navigate to Administration.
If you’re not already on the Settings page, click Settings.
Click Activate, and click OK.