Customer Portal Profiles Watch Out!

It has been a while since I contributed anything on my blog. I sometimes wonder how others manage to keep up with all the forms of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn, and Chatter as well as maintain everyday work, husband and father responsibilities. I for one find it hard but was recently prompted to try to Blog more.

So here is my first comeback. Now this obviously won’t affect you all but hopefully to you fledgling Salesforce.com Customer Portal creators/admins this may be helpful.

I recently posted this on the Salesforce.com Answers Community and here is the link: https://sites.secure.force.com/answers/ideaView?id=08730000000IVpKAAW

So I stumbled on this little gottcha just the other day when I was trying to inactivate some Lead record types. I received a message indicating all the profiles that had assigned to them the particular record type I was trying to inactivate. And there amongst all my standard and custom profiles were the Customer Portal profiles I had created. I then scratched my head and wondered aloud, “but Leads is not an object available to the Customer Portal.”

So just in case I was deceived I hoped on over to those profiles and checked and correct no Leads object, no Leads page layout, no Leads permissions and no Leads record types.

There is a fix, however, and again a stumble upon trying anything to get it to inactivate on the Customer Portal profile. Here is what to do:

Select one of your Customer Portal Profiles and go to the Record Type Settings section. Select the Edit link against your Account Master Record Type and in the URL you will need to remove the word Account at the ***id=Account*** point and type in its place capital L Lead and hit enter. You can now remove the Lead Record Type for that Customer Portal Profile. You will need to do this for every Customer Portal Profile you have.

All I can say is you better keep an eye on those Customer Portal profiles!