VDC Research is the leading market intelligence and advisory firm for the connected world. With unmatched domain expertise and rigorous primary research methodologies, VDC enables clients to find new opportunities for growth and make critical decisions with confidence.

Challenge:

• VDC Research purchased a Customer Community from Salesforce.com to expose their research articles to their existing customer base. However, their security requirement was that article access needed to be managed at the customer level, which did not align with the standard security model for Articles. VDC also had the need for extended search functionality, allowing for searching based on articles purchased and creation dates.

Solution:

The Proposed solution was engineered to utilize several aspects of the Salesforce Platform.

• A Custom Visualforce page that searched all of the existing articles within the Knowledge Base. This allowed the customer to have a process that returned a list of articles, by category, to the account page. There they could assign each article purchased by the customers by simply checking off a box next to the article that was assigned:

• The next part of the Solution was to manage the Community Users security access to these Articles by looking to the custom Article Access object and only presenting access to the articles that they were assigned to.
• A new Search function was built to allow for Content Searching along with the ability to search on Published date ranges and Purchased Date ranges:

The security infrastructure that has been configured allows VDC to fully manage their customer’s access requirements without the need for assistance from BlackIron. They now have a fully optimized Customer Community that works efficiently for their customers and the internal users that manage it.