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dhcrusoedhcrusoe 

Integrating Sites with another online community: Is this possible?

Hi there,

 

I'd like some quick input as to whether the following site structure/access is possible through Force.com Sites. Even preliminary suggestions would help. 

 

Background:

 

We (Citizen Schools) operate an online community, http://ctnation.citizenschools.net. The online community helps volunteers work with our afterschool program, which engages volunteers as teachers ("Citizen Teachers") of apprenticeships. The current site is maintained through DotNetNuke 4.9.2. 

 

We envision integrating DotNetNuke with Salesforce, to help Citizen Teachers manager their lesson planning. The integration is proposed to be as follows: 

 

A Citizen Teacher who is logged into the DNN site clicks on a link (develop lesson), which sends them to the Force.com Sites page. The link contains username and login information (as a ?uname= string) to authenticate them against the Force.com Site. 

 

Once authenticated, the Force.com Site page dynamically generates a list of the lessons they have created, based upon information stored in our SalesForce "Lessons" Object, and lets them add/edit/print/delete their lessons as necessary. 

 

Questions:

 

Q1. How might we authenticate "public" users, such that they can only see their own lessons? Could we pass a cookie? A URL string? An authentication method? We're assuming that the lookup might be against data in the Lessons object, which might contain a field called "Users" that indicates all of the individuals who can view a particular lesson stored in the object. 

 

Q2. Added: Would "Customer Portal" functionality be necessary in this scheme?  Or in what seems to be similar to IdeaStorm, can we have a class of public, but authenticated, user who can interact with certain parts of the system, but on a non-fee method?

 

Q3. Any other thoughts/comments about this proposed implementation of Sites? 

 

Thanks for your help! 

--Dave

Message Edited by dhcrusoe on 04-08-2009 12:56 PM
Message Edited by dhcrusoe on 04-08-2009 12:57 PM
BulentBulent

if you need authentication then you must use customer portal. If you don't need crm functionality after authentication then You might check the new ideas only login based portal licenses from best pricing point of view.

 

What you are talking about is like SSO integration with customer portal 

 

 

RyanGuestRyanGuest

Ideastorm.com is using customer portal to manage their logins (if that helps you envision what's going on behind the scenes).

 

I don't know how hard it is to integrate DotNetNuke 4.9.2. with Salesforce.com, but I know a number of organizations who have integrated their Drupal (a PHP equivilent of DotNetNuke) websites with Salesforce.

Mike LeachMike Leach

If you can maintain each users SForce ContactId in the CMS, then use the Partner API to query/cache Lesson objects (or any other object) in real-time.