What is the difference between External Sharing & Customer Workspace?

To put it in simply:

• External Sharing is a frictionless way to share and communicate Project updates with customers and other stakeholders. Share a read-only public link to Project records with Partners and Customers with no need for login credentials. 
• Customer Workspace provides a secure space to collaborate with your customer.

Compare External Sharing and Customer Workspace:

 

External Sharing

External Sharing allows you to share Projects with anyone outside of Salesforce with a public link. Projects with External Sharing enabled will generate a unique public URL that can be sent to anyone and grants the viewer 'Read-Only' access to the Project. The external viewer will not be required to login with a username or password.

Anyone with the link will be able to view the shared Project and its Tasks (only those marked as Shared with Customer), and view your shared notes within their details, but will not be able to edit or complete Tasks.

External Sharing Considerations

External Sharing is not enabled by default and must be set up by a Salesforce Admin. Please read the following considerations before enabling External Sharing:

• External Sharing requires ONE full Precursive Licence to be assigned to a "Site Guest User".
• External Sharing will enable external access to your Projects, Phases, Insights, Health, Milestones and Tasks as described above. This introduces a potential risk of external users accessing Task information. Only share this link on a need-basis and with trusted users.
• Enabling External Sharing is done entirely at your own risk. If you are unsure about enabling External Sharing, you should discuss this within your organization.

How Block Search Indexing

To prevent search engines like Google from indexing your External Sharing site and making shared project links discoverable in search results, you can add a noindex directive to the site’s head markup.

1. Go to Setup > Digital Experiences > All Sites
2. From the List of Sites select Builder next to the External Sharing site
3. From Experience Builder go to Settings > Advanced > Edit Head Markup.
4. Paste the following: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">.
   This signals to Google: “don’t index this page.”
5. Publish the Site.

Customer Workspace

Customer Workspace allows you to share Projects with Customers where they can collaborate and contribute. Customer Workspace is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud (Formerly Community Cloud) and can be integrated into an existing Salesforce Experience Cloud site.

From the Customer Workspace, your Customers can see Projects that they are assigned to with Tasks that are accessible for them. 

Customer Workspace Considerations

Customer Workspace is not enabled by default and must be set up by a Salesforce Admin. Please read the following considerations before enabling Customer Workspace:

• Customer Workspace requires BOTH a “Salesforce Community License” and a “Precursive Community License”. 
  • If you already have an existing Salesforce Experience Site with Licensed external users then you can purchase “Precursive Community License” to expand this functionality to Precursive Customer Workspace. 
  • If you do not already have an existing “Salesforce Community License” then these can be purchased directly from Precursive combined with a “Precursive Community License”
• Precursive supports “Customer Community” License Type ONLY. “Customer Community Plus” Licenses implement a more complex data-sharing model not yet supported.
• Enabling Customer Workspace involves sharing data with people outside of your organization, this can carry a risk. You should follow Salesforce guidance to Secure Your Experience Cloud Site. 

If you have any questions, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email customersuccess@precursive.co.uk for more information.

Designing your Customers’ Experience

External Sharing and Customer Workspace run on Salesforce Experience Cloud to share access to:

• Projects
• Phases
• Lists
• Tasks
• Insights
• Health

With the Digital Experience Builder, you can ✅:

1. Include your company branding, custom colors, and logos
2. Build Pages for the records you want to share
3. Include standard Salesforce components along with custom and third-party components. 

If you do not intend to share these records then your Digital Experience site can be configured to hide these components.

Share Projects and Phases with Customers

You can share Projects with customers from both the Project and Phase level. You can decide which Phases are shared, and once done, you can also control which related records are shared (Lists, Tasks, Health, and Insights). 

To share Projects and Phases:

1. Navigate to the Projects tab and select your chosen Project. 
2. From the Project, navigate to the upper right corner, select the dropdown menu and then click ‘Share with Customer’. 
3. From the “Share with Customer” modal select the “Customer Workspace” or “External Sharing” tab depending on how you plan to share the Project.
4. If you have multiple Phases a switch will appear for each Phase, so you can select which Phases to share.

Share Records with Customers

As a security mechanism, records are not automatically set to be shared. To make records visible to customers, each record needs to be marked as Shared with Customer. This can be done manually, or by using Templates. 

When a record is Shared with Customer it will be shared to External Sharing and Customer Workspace depending upon how you have chosen to share the Project. There is not an option to selectively share certain records to External Sharing and others to Customer Workspace.

NOTE: For Tasks to be shared the Tasks List must also be shared. 

Share Records manually

• Navigate to the record and click Edit
• Check the Shared with Customer box

Share Records by default using Templates

When using List and Task Templates, add a column with the header Shared with Customer. Use the values True or False to define whether the Record should be shared, or not. 

Impact on related records

Due to a Master-Detail Relationship, when certain Records are shared, their “child” related records will also be shared, and it’s not possible to hide them. 

• When Tasks are shared, any associated Contributors and Checklist Items will also be shared
• When Phases are shared, Participants will also be shared.