Portal to Community Migration Made Easy

With Salesforce’s release of Communities a few years ago, more and more companies are moving off of their legacy Salesforce Portals and switching to Communities. Although Salesforce has made the transition fairly painless overall, the first question we find ourselves asking is: “How do I move my existing Users from the Portal to the Community and retain their usernames?” This can be a bit tricky, but if you follow these four easy steps you will have your Community up and running for existing Portal users to access in no time.

Step 1 – Run an export of all existing Portal Users using the Data Loader.

Step 2 – Run an Update on these users with the “IsPortalEnabled” and IsActive” column set to “False.” Users will be deactivated and have an underscore appended to their username allowing you to reuse the original name for creation of the Community Users.

Step 3 – Format a .csv with the following column headers. You can use the Portal User Export to create this file.

-ROLE ID (optional, only used for Partner and Customer Plus Users)
– First Name
– LastName
– CONTACT ID (use the contact id of previously created contact)
– PROFILE ID (This also assigns the associated Salesforce License)
– Username
– Email
– Alias
– TimeZoneSidKey
– LocaleSidKey
– EmailEncodingKey
– LanguageLocaleKey

Step 4 – Run an insert with this file on the User object.

Now that the users are in the system and associated to the same Contact record, they will be able to access the Community using the same username. They will also maintain the same record associations they had in the Portal. When you send out the Community Welcome Email they can even set their password to the same password they were previously using! This is the best way to migrate from Portals to Communities with the lowest impact to your end users!