Unique email addresses

[netele]

Hi,

I'm thinking of using salesforce.com as the datasource for my website authentication. For this to work properly I would need to unique email addresses... I have three questions,

1)  Is anyone doing this out there?

2) Should this be done?

3) What would work well for my situation? I would like to have a central data storage for all my contacts...

Thanks,

RBL

[MT Dev]

Hi RBL,

I'm pretty new to Salesforce also, but there are a couple of issues that I am aware of using Salesforce as a datasource for authentication.

1) If the API is down, you are down. We replicate data daily using a get full contact list every night and a GetUpdated / GetDeleted every few minutes during the day.
2) Duplicate email addresses are a problem. We use both Lead and Contact sources since we don't want to have to have a contact to allow some degree of website access. You can look at some other posts about how to handle duplicates, but it isn't as cut and dry as I would like. I may also be a bit ignorant here, so others may have better data for you. Our functions do a query for lead and contact before something gets added via the API / form registration, but that takes out the ability to use WebToLead and doesn't account for users that get added to the system manually.

At any rate, hope this helps.