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Partner User Roles
When you enable the first external user on a partner account, a user role hierarchy is created for that account. This role hierarchy rolls up to the account owner (typically, the channel manager). The three roles in this hierarchy are Partner User, Partner Manager, or Partner Executive. When you create contacts on the partner account and convert them to external users, assign one of these roles to them.
Required Editions
| Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
| Applies to: LWR, Aura, and Visualforce sites |
| User Permissions Needed | |
|---|---|
| To manage partner users: | Manage External Users |
| To create, edit, and delete profiles: | Manage Profiles and Permission Sets |
| To create, edit, and delete page layouts: | Customize Application |
| To set field-level security: | Manage Profiles and Permission Sets AND Customize Application |
| To set sharing rules: | Manage Sharing |
The Partner User role rolls up to the Partner Manager role, which rolls up to the Partner Executive role. The Partner Executive role rolls up to the Channel Manager role. Partner users can view and edit all data owned by or shared with users below them in the hierarchy, regardless of the org's sharing model.
The role names include the partner account name. For example, the partner account name is Acme. The three roles created for the Acme account are Acme Partner User, Acme Partner Manager, and Acme Partner Executive. If the ownership of a partner account is changed to another channel manager, the partner user role is moved to that location in the role hierarchy.
We recommend that you reduce the number of roles to one. Grant super user access to partner users if you want them to see other partner users’ data.
For large Salesforce orgs, we also recommend that you move your partner roles to a separate branch in your role hierarchy. Then, grant the partner users access to the partner account with a sharing rule. This configuration improves performance for realignment operations when there are account owner changes.
You can delete partner roles, in which case the roles are renamed to maintain the hierarchy. For example, if the Manager role is deleted from a three-role hierarchy of Executive, Manager, and User, then the Executive role is renamed to Manager. The object ID remains the same. When you create a partner role, it’s automatically placed at the top as a parent. You can delete multiple roles in bulk for better performance. For example, if most of your users are assigned the User role, you can delete the Executive and Manager roles. For more information on deleting partner roles, see the SOAP API Developer's Guide.
Portal user roles aren’t included on the role hierarchy setup page. You can access portal user roles from the user’s detail page. You can edit the Label, Role Name, and Description fields on the user role. Contact Salesforce Support to enable editing on system-maintained portal user role fields.
