Create a Customer Account Portal

Follow Along with Trail Together

Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series.

(This clip starts at the 2:48 minute mark, in case you want to rewind and watch the beginning of the step again.)

Meet Ursa Major Solar

Ursa Major Solar, Inc., is a Southwest-based supplier of solar components and systems. It’s gone from being a local player to a regional one, and it recently opened a second sales and distribution center in a neighboring state. Competitively priced solar components are its bread and butter, but turnkey solar solutions are the fastest growing (and most profitable) part of its business.

Ever since it expanded into different markets, Ursa Major has been considering setting up a customer account portal so its customers can check the status of their orders and find information on their solar panels. The bigger it gets and the more clients it has, the more the need for a customer portal presents itself.

Maria, the Ursa Major system administrator, wants to create a customer account portal using Experience Cloud to give customers all the information they need in one place.

Now, Maria starts setting up a customer account portal. Go ahead and take these steps in your Trailhead Playground.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, then select Settings.
Select Enable Digital Experiences. Your digital experiences domain is shown. It includes your My Domain name in the format MyDomainName.my.site.com for production orgs.
Click Save.

Now that you’ve enabled digital experiences, let’s set up a bare-bones customer account portal. You should have been redirected to the All Sites page in Setup, but if not, enter Digital Experiences in Quick Find, and select All Sites .

Click New. The Creation wizard appears with different template options for you to choose from.
Select the Customer Account Portal template.
Click Get Started.
Name the site Ursa Major Customer Account Portal and enter UrsaMajorPortal at the end of the URL.
Click Create.

Your portal is now in Preview status, which means that what you’ve created so far isn’t in the world yet. Take a quick look around. This is Experience Workspaces, and you'll be coming back here soon to customize and administer your site.

Create Customer Users

Now that we’ve enabled digital experiences in our org, we can convert a couple of contacts to customer users.

Before you create customer users, ensure that the admin user (you in your Trailhead Playground) has a role assigned. In your Trailhead Playground, click your user name. Click User Detail | Edit and select any role.

Also, a best practice when creating external users is to clone the standard profile (in this case, the Customer Community User profile), and go through all the user permissions with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that all the settings are ones that you want. We're using standard profiles in this project to save some time. To let standard external profiles to be used, select the Allow using standard external profiles for self-registration and user creation in Setup > Digital Experiences > Settings.

Click and select Accounts, and choose the All Accounts list view.
Click Grand Hotels & Resorts Ltd .
Click Tim Barr from the Contacts related list.
From the dropdown menu, select Enable Customer User .
Change the following in the New User detail page:
1. Email: [Enter your email address so you can get login information for your newly created users.]
2. Username: [unique username in an email format]
3. User License: Customer Community
4. Profile: Customer Community User
5. City: Chicago
6. Select the Generate new password and notify user immediately checkbox. Click Save .

Note that you just changed the city to Chicago in Tim’s user object. This bit of knowledge is going to be handy in a little bit.

Now take the same steps with Edna Frank, a contact on the GenePoint account, but leave the city blank or enter a city different from Chicago.

Add the Profiles to Your Portal’s Membership

Now that you’ve created a basic customer account portal and enabled customer users, you’re ready to add the user profiles as members to your portal.

From Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, then select All Sites.
Click Workspaces next to the Ursa Major portal.
Click Administration | Members.
To add members using profiles:
1. Select the Customer Community User profile. (If you don’t see the profile, change the search to All.)
2. Click Add.
3. Click Save.

Once you publish and activate the portal (which we’ll do in a later step), you’ll receive automatically generated welcome emails to let you know you’ve been added to an active portal.