Add multiple contacts to a case via the community

Question

I'm looking to implement something similar to how case collaborators works for salesforce support. We want our external users to be able to add other contacts at their organization to a case as "CCs" so that they'll get email notifications when there are updates to the case, even if they aren't the primary contact on it.

Poking around it looks like there is an idea out there for a similar function that has been under product team review for a number of years. I haven't found anything tangible about workarounds though. Does anybody have experience doing something along these lines?

Answer 1

Well, Not exactly out of the box solution, but let me give a try.

We have a feature in SF called as "Follow Records" , that allows you to follow updates/chatter feed on certain records. Also if you make your chatter notification setting as every - email you will get email notification for chatter feeds for that record.

You can use it to your advantage, Create a custom GUI that allows you to add case collaborator. That UI will just make the user follow that record using apex.

ChatterUsers.ConnectApi.Subscription subscriptionToRecord = ConnectApi.ChatterUsers.follow(communityId, userId, '001RR000002G4Y0');

Once that is done, all case comments will be emailed and every case collaborator will get notification.

Answer 2

For those looking we ended up creating a custom lightning component to handle this. The component basically allows users to look up other users at their org and add them to the case as Case CCs which are stored in a separate child object.

We then created a flow to send the notifications to these contacts whenever there is a notification triggered from the account.