Multiple Users for a contact in SalesForce Customer Portal

This article discusses about

• Creating Multiple Users for the same contact in Customer Portal

While there is already an article on SalesForce wiki about creating a customer portal user, it doesn't address my case of creating users through a trigger instead of the visual force page.  Also, the user creation is not dependent on the contact creation but creation of a contact's child record.  Before I jump into the nuts and bolts of the things, let me give a background.  (Here I assume that you have an understanding of how single sign-on works.  SalesForce has a very good article describing single sign-on process in salesforce.  This article only deals with traditional SAML 2.0 federation authentication as salesforce supports only this type of authentication of Customer Portals.

Background
Recently, I came across an issue related to the single sign-on integration with salesforce.  The existing identity provider system identifies users by the subscription ids.  For example, if John Smith has three subscriptions (S100, S200 and S300), then John is identified by the IDP as a three users who have access to the system.  In SalesForce, we have created Subscriptions of Contact.  So, subscription details (start date, end date, payment, active/inactive, etc..) is the child of the Contact.  That means that we have cannot use subscription IDs to create users; as SFDC only allows one user per contact.  You cannot create multiple portal users for the same contact. 




Implementation
This implementation only addresses the test case and trigger that was developed as a proof of concept to show how we cannot create multiple portal users for the same contact


First we account and contact in the test case

Evaluating IaaS for Small and Medium Size companies Part 1

I've been spending some part of my last week evaluating Infrastructure as a Service companies to move my company servers onto the cloud.  Being a cloud services company it makes easier for us to move the infrastructure to the cloud.  There are several advantages to move the servers from in-house or remote management to the cloud.


1.  Less hassels managing the hardware
2.  Paying for the administrators to manage hardware
3.  Removes hassels of dealing with the ISP
4.  That is not my companies core competencies
5.  I pay only for the resources that I use and most of the times, I'm not utilizing resources 100%
6.  Makes the company more green and saves green bucks


I've used Gartner's magic quadrant to evaluate the Service provides.  I narrowed down to three for the ease of evaluation and also access to the service companies


1.  RackSpace
2.  Amazon Web Services EC2
3.  GoGrid


Total Cost:
I think Amazon has one of the best self-help documentations available among the IaaS.  The other thing I like about Amazon is their price structure.  It is standard and easier to understand and predict.  Compare these with anyone in this group and you would get a reply, talk to account manager or how about some free trail.      This just leads me to believe that I don't know the exact cost in next one, two or three years that I would incur when I'm moving my server infrastructure on your backbone.  I don't mean to say that this drives me away from other three wonderos.  But price is one of the drivers of moving from in-house to cloud.  Isn't it?


VPN, Private and Public Clouds:
To my surprise, Amazon doesn't have a good VPN, Private and Public Cloud services.  GoGrid and RackSpace both offer these services.  May be because, Amazon thinks that its too much of an hassel and also their customer base isn't asking them a lot yet.  Honestly for me this is a "good to have" currently, because we don't have plan to be in a mix of clouds.  Being a small company, it doesn't make sense to be working on multiple cloud offerings.  So for me this is a good to have feature so that in future when I need it I can make use of them


Managed and Self-managed cloud:
Since being a small company and servers not being a core competency, I was looking for a managed or some kind semi-managed.  GoGrid and Rackspace scored brownies here and Amazon was all about self-managed infrastructure.  So if I wanted to move to Amazon, I'd to spend some part of my time maintaing the infrastructure


Customer Service:
Customer Service from Amazon perspective is as good as its costs are.  Also, I think from the stand point of moving from moving ones infrastructure onto cloud, there is little an IaaS vendor would offer interms of Strategy.  The uptime and any backups are critical and all three vendors do a great job in uptime and guarantee. GoGrid offers 100% uptime.  


Licensing and Software Package:
I think in all Amazon had the best package in terms of licensing.  You can use ms-sql server licenses that you already have purchased to use them in AMIs.  Also I think there is some documentation that is involved between you and Microsoft regarding this.  Also, I've heard that GoGrid and RackSpace offer similar offerings but not tested them.  Also, I don't have clear picture on much money additional software costs on these machies compared to AWS AMIs.


Speed and Latency:
Amazon is the best in the industry interms of latency.  In east coast they have servers in Virginia (did I mention in Herndon?) which is great for someone is lives at a stone throw:).  Anyways, they have pretty good DCs located across the globe.  I think GoGrid and RackSpace have pretty good reach in North America.  But being a small business, currently, I am not looking for a reach across the globe.  So for me, all three are tie


Thought Leaders:
Amazon has been one of the key drivers in this space and have wide array of offerings.  RackSpace is surely an industry mover for IaaS and managed hosting.  GoGrid is a niche player for IaaS.  Again all these analysis is based on my evaluation of the three offerings and Gartner's magic quadrant.