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chrispattonchrispatton 

Corporate site single end-user login

Hi All,

 

I'm new to salesforce (both as a user and as a soon-to-be developer) and I was wondering if I could get a little help in trying to design out how to implement customer logins to our corporate site.

 

We want to have a single user login for everything on our site including:

- Watching Screencasts / Webinars

- Using a trial sandbox of our software

- Support/Case tracking

- Feature suggestion

- Commenting on our corporate blog

- Forums

- etc.

- Anythign else we might want to add in the future

 

Basically, we want our customers to have a single identity that they use whenever they interact w/ our company, and we want that login to be tied directly to the Contact record in Salesforce, so we can have as complete a picture as possible about their activities w/ us.

 

I've had a chance to read up on (at a high level) sites and customer portal (self service, and the full), and I'm not sure that our needs can completely be met through these. The only solution that I can think of right now is to manually to all of the authentication, and then use the authenticated info to query Salesorce through the API.

 

I'm hoping that there's a better way to do this.

 

Thanks in advance!

Best Answer chosen by Admin (Salesforce Developers) 
chrispattonchrispatton

Thanks!

 

My goal is to avoid having a separate database, so I was considering keeping the authentication info on the Contact object itself.Is that a good/bad idea?

All Answers

kingkong94538kingkong94538

There are various ways to implement this.

A simple way is to do mapping in some data repoistory.

Authenticate the user and then transfer user to Salesforce through the webservice.

chrispattonchrispatton

Thanks!

 

My goal is to avoid having a separate database, so I was considering keeping the authentication info on the Contact object itself.Is that a good/bad idea?

This was selected as the best answer
kingkong94538kingkong94538

I think it'll work. For my projects, I used java property files to manage such information but there were only 300 users. (BTW, there was no performance issue). I created the ACL interface using JSPs and deployed everything as one webapp to the server. The solution was used for 4 years without any issue ever reported.

 

There is just one concern that you may want to clarify, check with your corporate it security dept about your solution. Some companies never allow user access management outside their network.

 

 

chrispattonchrispatton
Fantastic. Thanks!