It’s Not About Technology, It’s About Ideas

The Ideas platform provides a method to collect feedback from end users, consumers, and other influencers of a product or service.  The goal of ideas is to create a collaboration platform to prioritize requests and highlight delivery of past requests.

Examples of this platform in action:
http://ideas.salesforce.com
http://www.mystarbucksidea.com/

You could use this platform in any number of ways; here are a few examples:

• A suggestion box for your company
• Prioritize software feature requests from your end users
• Use customer/partner portals to collect and prioritize product feedback from outside of your company

Technical Details:

• Ideas
  • Ideas support custom fields.
  • Validation rules can take place on the idea or on idea comments.
  • Ideas does not have a traditional page layout.  The fields layout determines the order in which custom fields are presented under additional information.
    
  • Categories is a standard multi-picklist field.  New categories are added on the fields page; categories are disabled through idea settings.
• Idea Communities
  • Limit of 1 internal idea community for professional orgs.  Max of 50 for EE/UE/DE, can be linked to portals.
  • Determine which picklist values are present.
  • Determine which portals users can access this particular community (can be all portals or a single portal type).
  • Determines the Experts Group.
  • Cannot specify which fields are displayed (this is universal).  Potential work-arounds include using VF or setting field-level security to hidden on a profile-basis.
• Experts Group
  • An experts group denotes a community expert – it gives them a star.
    Expert:
    
    Non-Expert:
    
  • The experts group selection points to a public group.  Each member of that public group will be listed as a community expert.
• Additional Notes
  • Half-Life (in Days) determines how quickly old ideas drop in rankings on the Popular Ideas subtab.
    
  • Delegated Data Administration is not available for Ideas.
  • Ideas does not appear to be available for platform licenses.