Community access for Internal Users

Question

i am having a confusion over community usage, all this while when i worked with communities it was mostly external users(Accounts or contacts which i used to enable as community user). Now we have a lot of Internal users and we are trying to build case management for them, i can see community can be given access to internal users too as per the Member access screen i see for the community.

Is it a normal practise to use community for internal users too? Internal users i mean here is standard salesforce license. Once feedback i got from an architect was internal users can be given access to community for the sake of branding, is it true?? can me as standard user only have community page access.

Answer 1

You can add internal users to a community by adding the profiles to the community in the community management. They can also be set up to login via the community as well as the Salesforce login page.

There are also community licences for internal users who only need a limited amount of Salesforce functions. These are called Employee Apps Starter and Employee Apps Plus with full details here. The advantage of using these is a lower cost for the users that only need a subset of standard SF functionality and access to some managed packages.

Those Employee Apps licences exclude the full Service Cloud functionality for cases, such as the Console, but can be useful if you have internal users who may need to raise cases but not manage them.

For them to access a specific community you will have to add their profiles to the communities members.

For Employee Apps Starter licenses, cases can track internal and employee issues, but should not be used for customer cases. Internal employee users must have a Service Cloud license to interact with external cases.