Consulting Spaces

As a Consultant - adding a space per client; working with clients; setup customer space; create customer space ;

Richard Parker avatar
Written by Richard Parker
Updated over a week ago

Consulting Spaces can only be created by users with a consulting license. These Spaces grant access to full Elements capabilities, allow consultants to connect as many Salesforce Orgs as they need, and share it with other consultants.

The only limitation is that consulting spaces do not allow to grant standard edit rights on the Space, meaning that your clients won't be able to edit or create content within those Spaces. However, the different scenarios are explained further in this article.

Article outline:

Prerequisites

Before you create consulting spaces you need to:

Creating a new consulting Space

To create a new consulting Space you follow the same procedure as when creating any new Space. However, in the window you will now see the option to create a 'consulting space'. Select it and press 'create'.

That's it! Your new Space will be visible with an orange tag 'consulting'.

Upgrading an existing space to 'consulting'

You may not want to create a consulting space straight away. You may want to create a standard 'free' space and upgrade it into a trial - for instance if you want to demo or trial the product with the client.

At any point you can take your free Space or Trial Space and upgrade it to 'consulting' space. Just go to the Space list as before, find the relevant Space and then click 'Upgrade' in the right panel (green button).

However, you won't be able to upgrade if there are any editors on the Space who are not holders of the consulting license. You will need to take away those rights first before you proceed.

Connecting customer Org in consulting Spaces

Normally only Space admins can connect Orgs in a Space. However, on consulting Spaces a viewer (user without any permissions) can still connect an Org.

This is useful when you have a client whose Org you want to connect and assess but you have not yet been given (or cannot be given) a separate license or relevant permissions within the customer's Org. That mechanism allows the customer to connect and authorize the connection themselves.

Consulting space lifecycle - different scenarios

You can use the consulting Space to run your project for as long as you hold the consulting license. When the project comes to an end, or when the client wants to play a more pro-active role in the implementation, you have several options available:

(a) The client purchases licences. To retain the Salesforce MetaData dictionary/Org Model, a Salesforce Org Connection is the minimum. Any client editors are extra. (Your Consulting Editors remain on the space at no charge). Retaining Enterprise level for the space is based on number of users. see customer pricing.

(b) You continue to run using your Consulting licence or purchase licences for the customer and charge through to them as a Managed Service (see here for running Elements as a Managed Service). We convert the Space to Consulting Space and all additional licences are tied to a licence anniversary date for the space.

(c) Nobody Purchases licences and the client does not want the content maintained. The named consultant(s) with Consulting licences remain as editors on the space at no additional charge for as long as they retain "current" paid for consulting licences. There must be at least one Consulting license on the space to retain full access to the information, and that Consulting license holder must be a space admin.

(d) Conscious decision to downgrade space to a Free space : This may be desirable if the client is only using the basic Process Mapping capabilities without integrating it with Salesforce, using any of the premium capabilities (content governance, version controls, links to Stories, Requirements, Data Tables, integrations including Salesforce content, metadata impact analysis etc...). All Salesforce Org model and reference model content will be suspended (deleted 120 days after the sate of suspension) along with all change logs, audit trails, version and release management information. All that remains is the Process content in draft mode.

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