According to SF's SOAP API documentation:
IsVisibleInSelfService: Indicates whether the case can be viewed in the Customer Service Portal, Partner Service Portal, and Self-Service Portal (true) or not (false). This field is applied for case visibility in the Partner Relationship Management, Customer Service Portal, and the earlier version of Self Service Portal. The field does not alter sharing and will not prevent usage of a direct URL to a case if a portal user has read or write access.
Our customer community uses Customer Community Plus licenses in particular. From my testing, it appears that the 'IsVisibleInSelfService' checkbox has no bearing on whether a case is visible within a Customer Community or not. Is this a correct statement?
More info:
I seem to be able to share cases with customer community users based on a combination of org-wide sharing settings for external users, and role-based sharing rules which seem to be specific to customer based roles.
- I set up our org wide sharing settings for external users to be 'Private' for cases, but I also have the box checked for 'share using role hierarchy'
- Therefore, when a community user creates a case, that record is shared with other users based on their role heirarchy
- Our Community users can have one of 3 account-specific roles, with the general hierarchy of Executive > Manager > User
- Sharing between community users in the same account works the same as for internal roles: higher level can read/edit, same level can read only, lower level has no visibility.
Best Answer
In case anyone else ends up here, this is what I learned:
IsVisibleInSelfService, aka the "Visible in Self Service Portal" checkbox, is a standard salesforce field that by default is only designed to work with old customer portals, not new communities. I got confused because my org had custom code that utilizes this checkbox in our community, but that is nonstandard.
Customer Community Plus users use essentially the same sharing model as internal SF users (roles, profiles, CRED access, etc), and don't have any special sharing tools like the older portals do.