Exceed the Salesforce File Storage Limit – A Complete Guide
Salesforce is a great CRM tool for businesses of various sizes and it’s efficient solutions including Chatter make it a leading collaboration platform.

However, there is a common question that stands often, how to manage file storage space and what are the options where we can store files inside the Salesforce? The perfect answer for this would be, store files in a place, where file accessibility won’t be a challenge. 

Let’s have a sneak peek of what are the points we need to consider while deciding on our Salesforce file storage. 

  • The Salesforce Files (formerly Chatter Files)
Before Salesforce Files there were the Chatter Files. Chatter is majorly focused around enabling users to collaborate seamlessly. This is also done to enable much easier cooperation through a social enterprise environment. Files are an intrinsic part of document collaboration, hence, it makes sense to integrate them with the social side of things, which results in turbo-charging your organization. Salesforce files do a similar thing by integrating Chatter with Salesforce CRM Content and thereby, allowing users to access and share the files stored there. This is also done if they have the right permission.

Using the Salesforce files, individuals can actually upload files privately until they have decided upon sharing them. They can also subscribe to files, get notified when a file has been updated.

The process of sharing can be done in the following ways:
  1. Sharing with an individual
  2. Sharing with the existing groups of people inside Salesforce
  3. Sharing with link
  4. By indirectly, attaching a Salesforce file to the Chatter feed of a record, as mentioned previously

The Salesforce Documentation

It is true that you also have control over the access permissions. Files in  Chatter can be:
  1. Completely private – No access at all
  2. Shared with viewer permissions – Viewer permission to access
  3. Editable by collaborators – Collaborator
  4. Fully shared – With the owner
  • Salesforce CRM Content

This option is mostly being used to store all the marketing collateral or at times even support-related documents. You can indeed store templates and the standard marketing collaterals, publishing the official corporate files, which are to be used by sales or support teams while dealing with customers. In fact, the co-workers can then clone and customize document templates and use it later as per their needs and requirements.

You can also be one of the members of multiple Libraries and will be able to see them in the Libraries tab. This is not it, you can as well see them under the Salesforce Files tab. Users can also attach a file stored in a Library, directly to the Chatter Feed of a record.

However, one drawback that can be registered here, is that you cannot have nested folders. Each Library will be acting like a flat folder in which you are not allowed to have any kind of sub-folders.

  • The Salesforce Attachments
One more traditional ways of storing Salesforce files is Salesforce Attachment. This is the one that allows you to attach files and documents to individual records.

However, this works well, when short sales cycles are being generated, with a small number of files per record. The file size is also limited to 25 MB per file. In fact, posting a file in the Chatter feed will automatically show the file in the notes and attachment section of that specific record, just that the type being feed attachment.

The limitations of Salesforce Attachments include the following:

  1. Lack of sharing via links
  2. The lack of version control
  3. Absence of sharing permissions
  • The Documents

This is where you can indeed store the web resources like logos, the HTML banners and also the Visualforce materials. These are generally such resources, which you plan on using for email campaigns and also for any images that are to be used in a template.

  • The Alternatives

If at any point of time you find that storing files in Salesforce is too expensive, or that your needs are not collaborating with what Salesforce provides in terms of file storage and usage, you can always look at cloud storage alternatives that are available; like AWS, Google Drive, Box.com, OneDrive, Huddle or Dropbox. You can even store your Salesforce files in a local storage system. 

XfilesPro is an external file storage and collaboration solution for Salesforce, that can help you store your files easily in your preferred external storage system. This allows you to optimize your primary Salesforce file storage space and reduce high file storage cost. 

Get in touch with XfilesPro team now for a demo.

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