We have a situation where there is an opportunity and we would like to give access to some outside people. These are not our employees but partners.

not a write permission on the record, but more like an chatter user to add comments, no changing of the records data

Is there a way we can provide access to these users?

Attribution to: Prady

Possible Suggestion/Solution #1

It's certainly possible, however, it all depends on what kind of access you want to give them.

For example: You could build a hosted App that uses one of the Salesforce APIs to access the data. Or create an interface via Sites.

Do you this 'outside person' to have read only access? Or should they be able to write/update the record as well?

Do you want them to be able to access the data with unique credentials so you can limit access and/or track changes?

Attribution to: jordan.baucke

Possible Suggestion/Solution #2

The correct way to provide partners access to Opportunities is via the Partner Portal. This provides the external users with access via a separate website to your regular users, access only to data that you have enabled etc. The one downside at the moment is that there is no chatter access. There is an idea for this at:

http://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000HD9z

but as there's no comment from product management, it doesn't sound like this is something coming any time soon.

Unfortunately, if you need chatter access, you will have to provide these external users with a Salesforce license in order for them to be able to view the opportunity records, which makes it somewhat expensive.

Attribution to: Bob Buzzard
This content is remixed from stackoverflow or stackexchange. Please visit https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/4277