We don't use Salesforce for sales, but as employer database for a workforce development agency. We have a partner ( a community college) who would like to have access to our system in order to know which employers to call in the area to see if they may need training services. They would be first checking our system to see when the last time we contacted the employer AND to enter in account, contact, activity, if the partner calls on an employer we have not before. OR to log in the activity if we already have the account, contact established.
My question is, we don't want them to be able to see all of our activities or projects with employers. We would like to limit their view to the account and contact information and the date of the activities but not the detailed information about the activities. Also, we would like them to be able to enter new accounts and contacts if we don't have them in our system. Also, they would be allowed to enter in activities for the contacts they make with employers. We would like to be able to task them as well.
Which option would best suit our needs for this partner? A partner portal or just giving them a license and creating a profile set to the limitations we want to have in place?
This is a great question. I would say you've got a lot of things to consider--first, partner portal licenses are cheaper than full user licenses. However, full user licenses would mean less maintenance as you would just be using standard security and profile settings to manage those users. Either way, you can limit viewing rights to projects for users.
I think the biggest question I noticed above is the hiding of Activities. This has come up a lot, and there are multiple options for managing. Sometimes people will create a junction object and set the security to only allow certain people to view those records and the activities associated with them. That is certainly an option because private activities are not fully supported--see the Idea here.
