As a comprehensive platform that enables businesses to streamline any of their critical processes, Salesforce has been exceptional in the last two decades. With over 150,000+ customers from multiple industries and sizes, today Salesforce is offering a full suite of solutions spanning across sales, service, marketing, commerce, analytics, Customer 360 platform, etc. In order to maintain top-notch org performance and business productivity, the CRM giant has limited some of its capacities. Storage is one of those. A Salesforce org comes with a limited amount of data & file storage, and anything additional to these comes with a hefty price.

To ensure you never run out of your storage and operate the business in a highly optimized org, enterprises adopt various long-term data & file management strategies. For example, in order to optimize the data storage, leading enterprises implement an intelligent archival plan, while to deal with a growing number of files of large sizes, they look for external storage integration. However, things become a little more obscure, when the volume of files is million in number & you need a robust system in place to manage those files cost-effectively. 

Companies use Salesforce Community Cloud to connect with their customers in a better way. Enterprises having a community portal (Salesforce Community Cloud License) with a lot of community users who consistently generate a lot of files, often find them in the middle of a crisis where they left with no option other than purchasing additional storage with a very high price, or delete old files or build a solution that can help them store the files somewhere else. 

So what are the challenges that Salesforce customers face when it comes to managing a huge pile of files coming from multiple community users? Here are the top three basic challenges;

• Limited native file storage – Unable to optimize
• High recurring (additional) file storage costs – More investment
• External file storage & collaboration – Need of a solution to enable this

External file storage & collaboration comes with its own set of challenges. 

• Choosing the right external storage system to integrate with Salesforce
• Collaborating files seamlessly with the external system
• Automating the entire process without any manual intervention
• Migrating large volume of files (Initial process)
• Defining the folder structure – Where to store the community user files in the remote storage
• Centralized content management system – Managing files from one place
• Customizing the solution to any extend – Meet evolving business needs

ALSO READ: Salesforce-SharePoint Integration – How to Transform your Salesforce File Storage Needs

How to Implement a Strategic Approach with XfilesPro?

In order to manage the huge volume of files generated by the community users, enterprises need to implement a future-proof file management strategy where they can rise above the limited native storage & make their file storage unlimited with external storage collaboration using advanced file storage & collaboration solutions for Salesforce like XfilesPro.

• Choose your External Storage

Choose from a range of options to integrate from various external Cloud (SharePoint, OneDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox) or On-premise (SMB, SFTP, Network Drive). The integration allows a better content management system for your entire community users & collaborate the files with the external storage. 

• Storage Optimization & Cost Savings

The integration will automatically store all the incoming community user-generated files in the chosen external storage & enable you to never run out of the primary file storage. This means no need for additional storage & high storage investment. 

• Centralized Content Management System

Drive high-degree of file collaboration with your internal as well as community users by ensuring files are managed centrally but available for all to share, view, download & edit. 

• Better Community Collaboration

Salesforce community portal integration delivers more capabilities to community portal users and thus extending the capacities deeper into the Salesforce ecosystem.

• Store Files in the Right Folder – Sorted & Synchronized File Management

A highly customizable file & folder management allows the business process to be embedded in the way files and folders need to save into your external storage. You can save specific community portal user-generated files in pre-defined specific folders automatically with zero human intervention. 

• Highly Customizable – Use the way you want

The solution is highly flexible & can be customized to any level based on specific Salesforce community file management needs.

• Collaborate External Files into the Salesforce System

Files staying in the external storage with a particular folder structure can be synced/linked with the respective records in the Salesforce system using the XfilesPro Bi-directional sync components. 

• Manage all the files under one roof

Link the files scattered in different storage systems such as On-cloud, On-premise, Community portal, and Salesforce system and manage them all from one place (external storage) by linking them with the Salesforce record.

• Large Volume File Migration

Migrate a large volume of community portal files from your Salesforce system to any external system seamlessly without impacting any of your on-going business processes. 

To know more about XfilesPro & it’s capabilities in managing Salesforce community portal files, please get in touch with our Salesforce file management experts today.