Use Zones to Organize Idea Communities

Note Starting with the Summer ’13 release, Chatter Answers and Ideas “communities” have been renamed to “zones.”

Professional Edition organizations can have only one internal zone. All other editions can have up to 50 zones shared between Ideas, Answers, and Chatter Answers. If you need more than 50 zones, contact Salesforce.

You can display a zone to the following types of users:

• Salesforce Experience Builder site users.
• Public users (requires setting up a Salesforce Site).
• Internal Salesforce users. Salesforce users can access all zones regardless of whether the Idea community is internal-only or displayed in a portal.
• Customer Portal or partner portal users.
• Salesforce console users.

Note You can’t use Salesforce sharing rules to restrict access to zones. When you create a zone, you can restrict access by selecting the portal where the zone appears. Only the users that are assigned to that portal (and internal Salesforce users) are able to access the zone, unless you expose it publicly using Salesforce Sites.

Users see zones, search results, and content that are associated with the context that is defined by their user profile:

• Idea community users see the zones that are associated with the Idea community that they’re signed in to.
• Internal users with permission to see Ideas can see all internal-only zones in the organization. If internal users sign in to an Idea community, they see only those zones that are associated with that community.
• Internal users with permission to see Chatter Answers can see all internal-only zones for the organization in the Q&A tab. If internal users sign in to an Idea community, they see only those zones associated with that community.
• Portal users can see the zones associated with their portal.
• Portal users with access to both a portal and an Idea community can see the zones associated with the portal or community that they’re currently signed in to.
• Users who are accessing the portal or Idea community through an API can access all zones that they have access to in all contexts.
• Global searches in the internal application that are performed by internal users return results from all ideas that are available within the organization. Searches performed by all other users in Salesforce Experience Cloud sites return results from the ideas that are available within the site.