Now let us take a look in depth on three very useful bunch of licenses, which will help you to cooperate with your partners, provide better service to your clients, interact with your employees and create communities for different purposes.
In this article, we are going to review Chatter User Licenses, Service Cloud Portal User Licenses and finish with Communities User Licenses.
Chatter User Licenses
We already know that all standard Salesforce licenses allow free Chatter access for everyone in your organization. In case you do not need standard functionality, Salesforce also offers Chatter-specific licenses: Chatter External, Chatter Free, and Chatter Only (also known as Chatter Plus). Chatter is a kind of Enterprise social network In your organization. Price for Chatter Only is 15 USD/user/app/month. Chatter Free is available within 1 CRM license without any additional charges.
Chatter External
Chatter External license is for external users (not from your company’s email domain). That means that your customers can be invited to Chatter groups that allow customers. Customers can access information and interact with users only in the groups they’re invited to. They have no access to Chatter objects or data.
Chatter Free
To access standard Chatter items such as people, profiles, groups, and files “not Salesforce users” can use Chatter Free license. This license type does not enable access any Salesforce objects or data, so you do not see tabs like other Salesforce users. Users with Chatter Free license can be Chatter moderator and can access feeds, people, groups, and files. Salesforce administrators can upgrade a Chatter Free license to a standard Salesforce or Chatter Only license at any time. But note that you can’t convert a standard Salesforce or Chatter Only license to a Chatter Free license.
Chatter External and Chatter Free licenses are available in: Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Contact Manager, and Developer Editions.
Chatter Only
The Chatter Only or the Chatter Plus license is designed for users that do not have Salesforce licenses but need an access to some Salesforce objects in addition to Chatter. This license type enables also:
- View Salesforce accounts and contacts
- Use Salesforce CRM Content, Ideas, and Answers
- Access dashboards and reports Use and approve workflows
- Use the calendar to create and track activities
- View and modify up to ten custom objects
- Add records to groups
The detailed comparison chart of features that are available for Chatter External, Chatter Free, and Chatter Only licenses, is available here.
Service Cloud User Licenses
Service Cloud is fully customizable support tool and help desk designed for your clients. The pricing starts from 75 USD up to 300 USD/a month per user depending on the edition. Here you can select the right Salesforce Lightning edition.
Service Cloud Portal users have the High Volume Customer Portal license. This license gives contacts unlimited logins to your Service Cloud Portal to access customer support information. Users with such license can access accounts, assets, cases, contacts, custom objects, documents, ideas, and questions, depending on their permission settings.
The Overage High Volume Customer Portal license is the same as the High Volume Customer Portal license, except that users do not have unlimited logins. This table lists the permissions that can be assigned to Service Cloud portal users.
You should contact Salesforce for information about the number of Customer Portal licenses you can activate.
Communities User Licenses
There are three Communities licenses for external users: Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Partner Community. In addition, there are Employee Apps Starter and Employee Apps Plus licenses for Employee Communities. With Communities Licenses you can build your own community, connect your customers and accelerate your partner sales, plus empower your employees. For example, customers can create and escalate support cases, partners can update opportunities and qualify leads, employees can access and share files. Here is a simple decision tree to help pick the most suitable license type for your community’s needs:
Customer Community - Business-to-consumer communities with large numbers of external users.
Customer Community Plus - Business-to-business communities for support and non-sales scenarios, such as eCommerce.
Partner Community - Business-to-business communities that need access to sales data such as partner relationship management.
More detailed overview of Communities licenses you can find here or read Salesforce Documentation.
Now you can see that Salesforce offers a big variety of licenses that allow you to interact with external or internal users. We hope this information was useful to you and will help to choose the right licenses that will empower your business management.
