Customer Portal and Partner Portal in Salesforce

81. What is the difference between Customer portal and Partner portal?

Traditionally Partner Portal is part of companies Partner Channel Sales efforts. It is a portal focused more on Sales force automation and the efforts of those partners that sell your products to nurture the leads you pass to them, the leads they enter in themselves and the convert to Opportunity and subsequent sale.

Customer Portal on the other hand is more focused on the Service and Support of one’s Customers.

The feature differences are that Partner Portal exposes the Leads and Opportunity objects whereas the Customer Portal does not. However, only the top tier of Partner licensing (Gold Partner licenses) exposes the Case object whereas this is standard in the Customer Portal.

82. Give one example where you will use a trigger instead of a workflow?

Workflow allows us to perform certain operation on only one object but if we required performing operations/tasks/updates on multiple objects then we use trigger instead of workflows.

83. Explain the lead conversion process in salesforce?

When you convert a lead, the standard lead fields are automatically converted to the new account, contact, and, optionally, an opportunity using the information from the lead.
Custom lead fields are converted to custom account, contact, and opportunity fields as specified by your administrator.
All open and closed activities from the lead are attached to the account, contact, and opportunity.

84. Dashboards cannot be created on which kind of Reports?

Dashboard cant be created using Tabular reports. (If we specify row limit, we can create dashboards using tabular reports also)

85. What is the difference between Task and Events?

An event is a calendar event scheduled for a specific day and time.
Examples of events are:
1)     Meetings
2)     Scheduled Conference Calls

A task is an activity not scheduled for an exact day and time. You can specify a due date for a task or there may not be a particular time or date that the tasks or activities need to be completed by.

Examples of tasks are:
1)     A list of phone calls you need to make.
2)      An email that needs to be sent.

86. What are person accounts?

A person account is an individual consumer with whom you do business, such as a financial services client, an online shopper, or a vacation traveler. Person accounts are applicable to organizations that operate on a business-to-consumer model as opposed to a business-to-business model.

87.  What are system fields? Can you name some of them?

System fields are read-only fields found on most objects. These fields are automatically updated during API operations
Examples are, Id, IsDeleted, CreatedById , CreatedDate , LastModifiedById , LastModifiedDate  and SystemModstamp

88. What is mini page layout?

A mini page layout contains a subset of the items in an existing page layout. Mini page layouts inherit record type and profile associations, related lists, fields, and field access settings from their associated page layout


89. What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) are about ensuring that your customers receive the best possible service from your organization. It is the drawing together of all the resources within your business to work for your customer to maximize your value to your their business.

90. Do I need to install anything on my workstation(s) to use Salesforce.com?

No! You can start using Salesforce.com through any web browser; however some extended functionality requires you to use Microsoft Internet Explorer because features such as mail merging from Salesforce.com to create a Word document require the installation of a small ActiveX plugin.

91. What happens if I find a fault in Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com incorporates an extensive help and 'how do I do that' system that is fully searchable. If you can't find an wer there why not ask one of our experts?

92. Can I use my existing applications in conjunction with Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com comes with a number of tools for integrating it with applications such as Word, Excel and Outlook. There is also a large pool of custom written paid for Apps and Plugins available at the 'Salesforce AppXchange. Further to this some versions of Salesforce,com provide access to the Salesforce.com API and if you have access to the skills of a Developer he will be able to learn to write code that might for example get Salesforce.com functioning with an existing Microsoft SQL Database.

93. What is a Lead?

A Lead is not yet a customer but any person or organization or company they may be interested in your company purchasing your product or using your services, you can import lead information into Salesforce by manually entering or importing from outside

94. What is a Contact?

A contact is any point of contact individual or influential directly associated with the account and possibly one or more opportunities. Information gathered about contact including name, phone number, address, position, and company and email information

95. Explain Lead conversion?

Lead can be converted in salesforce.com and the converted information is mapped to the appropriate business objects – Account, Contact or Opportunity


• The system automatically maps standard lead fields to standard account, contact, and opportunity fields
• For custom lead fields, your administrator can specify how they map to custom account, contact, and opportunity fields
• The system assigns the default picklist values for the account, contact, and opportunity when mapping any standard lead picklist fields that are blank. If your organization uses record types, blank values are replaced with the default picklist values of the new record owner.
• If the lead has a record type, the default record type of the new owner is assigned to records created during lead conversion.

96. What is a Web-to-Lead?

Web to Lead is an online form to capture lead information and this will be published on your website.


97. What is an Auto-Response Rule?

Auto response rules are rules configured to send an email/response to the users/group.
This determines which Email Template to send to cases generated via Web-to-Case


98. What is a Case?

Case is a logged issue or problem or Detail description of the problems, questions and feedback gathered from your customers.

Cases can be created by
• Manually entered from a phone call or an email
• Automatically create Case from an email (Email- to- Case)
• Automatically captured using Web site (Web-to-Case)
• Create a Case functionality in Outlook Edition
• May be assigned either manually or automatically via Assignment Rules

99. What is a Case Queue?

Case queue is a virtual storage bin that can be used to group cases based on criteria such as skill requirements, product categories, customer types, or service levels.
• Users have visibility into the Case Queues to which they are members
• Cases remain in the Queue until they are assigned to or taken by individual users

100. What is a Case Assignment Rule?

Case Assignment rules determines how Cases are automatically routed to User or Queue
Contains Rule Entries, pre-defined business rules that determine Case routing