Thursday, October 06, 2011

Salesforce.com - What's the difference between Documents and Content

In my classes, I recommend that people stop using Documents and start using Salesforce Content. I go through a laundry list of reasons. I just received an email from a student who forgot the reasons, so I thought I would post them here.

I'm sure there are other reasons as well, these are simply the reasons I recommend Salesforce Content over Documents:

Feature Documents Salesforce Content
Full Text Indexing Only the description of the document The entire document
Document Versioning No Yes, automatic
Subscriptions No Yes, users can choose to subscribe to a piece of Content and will be notified automatically if the Content changes
Online Viewing No Yes, certain types of documents such as Word and Powerpoint presentations can be viewed online instead of having to be downloaded
Workspace Permissions No. Folder security is universal. If you give everyone read only access, only the System Administrator can add and remove documents. If you give everyone read / write, everyone can add and remove documents Yes. Can set up a single workspace and give individual users or groups of users different permissions to the same folder.
Ability to Deliver to a Customer No, documents are internal. Yes. Content can be delivered to a customer and you can also track if a customer actually views the content. You can also prevent the user from downloading the document and allow them to only view the document online.
Searchable Only the description The entire document is searchable