In this article, we cover a common file sharing use-case for businesses using the Salesforce experience cloud. Such businesses often have internal Salesforce objects managed by internal company users, which are also shared with external experience site users. However, file-related features in such implementations are usually missing.

E.g. while your community users can upload files into the notes & attachments section, your internal users can only share files with community users using a chatter feed. Moreover, these files are not synced with your cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox etc...).

In this article, we illustrate how a simple CloudFiles widget enables bi-directional file-syncing between your cloud storage, your Salesforce objects and your community users. Although there are a lot of customizations possible, we have focused this article on a specific use-case of associating a SharePoint folder with a Lead Object, exposing the folder contents to an experience site, and then selectively providing access to contents of that folder to the experience site user.

This article is divided into the following sections -

If you have not already done so, install the CloudFiles app in your production or sandbox environment and connect it to a CloudFiles account

You can check detailed instructions along with screenshots in our Installation guide here.

In order to share files on a experience site, we first need to associate some files or folders to a Salesforce object that we wish to share. In this step we use the CloudFiles folder widget to link a SharePoint folder with a Salesforce Lead Object.

Moreover, while we are linking the folder manually in this step, it can also be automated using Salesforce Flows. You can check this article on Connect external folder to a record which has detailed screenshots on the setup.

As shown in Steps 1 & 2 of the above article, you can drag and drop the Folder widget onto the lead objects and then use the link folder button to connect a folder from SharePoint to the record.

Once the folder is connected, its live contents start showing on the record instantly as shown in the screenshot below -

Now that our internal folder is setup on the lead object, we can share this with our community users using the Salesforce Experience Site Builder

Go to Salesforce Setup and search "Digital Experiences". Click on All Sites option under Digital Experiences and click on the "Builder" button of the site where you want to add the file sharing to. For our example, we will add a folder widget to the lead details page of our experience site. 

On the left side panel, select components and scroll down to find the 'CloudFiles Connected Folder' Component. Drag and drop this component. Next you need to set reference to a record in your internal salesforce, as well as the record type, to tell this widget where to pick files from. For this example, we simply picked the files from the associated lead using it's recordId.

The steps are summarized in the video below -

That's it, now we are all set to see these files as a experience site user once we set the appropriate permissions for the experience site users.

Before your experience site users can see the connected folders, you need to enable appropriate permissions for them. This process can also be automated. Follow the simple steps below -

Now we are ready to see the files as a community user would.

Now login to your experience site as a user. Go to the appropriate page. You should be able to see the Files from the connected folder. You should also be able to upload, download, preview or search the files from right here. Here are the common file & folder operations supported by the CloudFiles Experience Cloud Widget.

The screenshot below shows this in action - 

In the previous step, as a community user, you could read and write all the files in the associated Sharepoint folder. However, a common requirement is to restrict this access. For example, you may want the community users to be able to see only certain files in that folder. Moreover, you may also want to restrict the upload or download flexibility.

As an internal user who has access to the Lead Object, you can do easily do this right from Salesforce. This feature is currently in Beta and should be released in some time.