Sharing Options and User Licenses in Salesforce Communities

While implementing Salesforce Community, identifying the record access requirements is an important steps which we all should do before procuring user licenses or setting up the communities. The reasons why I am telling this are -Sharing options in Communities depends on the type of Community User License (Customer or Partner)Even with the most open user license (Partner), there are few “gotchas” when it comes to sharing in a Community.You need to adjust internal sharing settings to make sure you are not giving unwanted record access to your community users.License TypesSalesforce has a great chart here which compares features between Customer and Partner user license. But I prefer the below picture while deciding the license types.In short, Customer licenses are designed for high-volume applications with any complex sharing requirements. Customer licenses are not having any roles. That is why sharing rules, Apex sharing and manual sharing are not available for Customer licenses.On the other hand, Partner licenses are having access to more object types. For example, if you want community users should have access to Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, upload contents then you need Partner license. Partner licenses are having roles so sharing options are available.In addition to the above two licenses, Salesforce has Customer Plus license which is kind of middle between Customer and Partner license. So if your requirement is that you want your customers to have full access...

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