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Chirag MehtaChirag Mehta 

Force.com Site Authentication Methods

If we need to do build a portal for lets say 5K+ users, need to consider COST as primary criteria for determination, which of below option is recommended or even allowed (wrt salefsorce contract etc) ?
  1. Salesforce Customer Portal : As this involves license fee per customer, hence this solution ends up to be too costly
  2. Force.com Site with Portal : This is similar to option1, here instead first login page is branded website page and behind this page is customer portal.
  3. Force.com Site with Custom Portal : This is like we build a portal, authentication, user management etc. This will not need any extra license but this is violation to salesforce agreement  (is it?) where they dont allow creating complete login mechanism. Hence doing this in hidden manner is not recommended.
  4. Communities
  5. Pay to Salesforce based on Number of Logins per month :  instead of paying per user per month, there's one concept of paying based on logins per month.
  6. Force.com (Public) Site with CustomerId/Token mechanism (no password) :  Here user enters some unique user-id/customer-id to login, no password simply a username. This option can be selected only if customer detail are not very sensitive as its unauthenticated or you can say authenticated just baed on some unique-id. There is one work around to make it more secure by sending a token to customer email address when they enter their email address as username and then entering the token (which they will receive in email) as password.
Shouldn't there be a cost effective solution which allows  to prepare portal for users where-in the functionality to be provided is read-only or number of portal users is too high.

Thanks,
Chirag Mehta | Satrang Technologies | http://www.satrangtech.com
Ashish_SFDCAshish_SFDC
Hi Chirag, 


Talking to Account Executive team at Salesforce for the Client might help in choosing the type of license and optione etc. 

Adding few links here for more information, 

http://salesforcevision.blogspot.in/2011/05/salesforce-portal-development.html

http://salesforcevision.blogspot.in/2013/01/a-salesforcecom-custom-portal-case-study.html

http://www.redpointsolutions.com/inexpensive-options-for-your-salesforce-customer-portal

http://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/23801/difference-between-self-service-customer-and-partner-portals

http://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/3708/customer-portal-manager-vs-authenticated-website


Regards,
Ashish