In many organizations, Partner ecosystems are essential to growth. This reliance on partners to supply and distribute products and services pushes organizations to share business processes and data to reduce friction. A key to driving desired outcomes is visibility into the right data at the right time.
In the past, Salesforce Partner and Customer Community users had read-only access to canned reports provided by the organization. Partners want to be in the driver’s seat to build and customize their own reports in their own folders. They want to be able to view actionable data for their teams in the same place they collaborate on deals.
Your voices have been heard! Salesforce used this Idea on the IdeaExchange to shape a new feature called Community Reporting that will debut with Summer 15 release.
Community Reporting
This is a huge win for Salesforce customers that have built a channel sales community.Portal/Community Users can now create and manage your own reports in your own folders. These users can now run summarization reports for different timeframes. They will have flexibility to slice and dice data to build custom reports by using summary fields, filters, and groupings as per their individual needs. This enables Partners further by allowing them to monitor their Opportunities and make informed decisions to drive deals to fruition.
In the Summer 15 release this feature will be available to Partner Community and Customer Community Plus licensed users.
Community Reporting will improve the Partner Community experience, decrease administration cost and improve overall adoption. When Partners are going to your Community for data to drive their business, adoption will follow.
How To: Turn it on in your Community
Administrators need to turn on the “Create and Customize Reports”, “Report Builder” and “Edit My Reports” permissions through custom profiles or permission sets. These permissions will be added to external user licenses that already have “Run Reports” permission.
An updated version of the Salesforce Communities Dashboards package will be released on the AppExchange shortly after the Summer 15 release.
Want more information on using Partner Communities to drive co-creation?
Summa Blog: “Is Co-Creation for B2B? You Bet!”
