NPC Platform Users?

Just after I wrote my post about using Platform licenses, I got an email from a reader asking about the idea of using platform licenses with Nonprofit Cloud (NPC). The funny thing is that I had considered whether or not to mention NPC when I was writing, but, in the end, decided that it would just add confusion and length without helping people.

I'm going to leave aside the question of whether an organization should be using NPC in the first place. (I think I've written enough about that elsewhere.)

The real questions are whether platform users are compatible with NPC (or any Industries solution like Public Sector Cloud, Health Cloud, Education Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, etc.) and how the costs would work. By the way, I'm going to just write "NPC" for the rest of this post. But as I understand it, what I'm writing would apply to any of the industry clouds.

For any platform user that was going to touch any of the NPC objects (“standard” objects...but not really), you would have to have a permission set license (PSL) to assign to that user. When you buy "one more user" for nonprofit cloud, you actually get a license (user login) and a PSL, bundled together.

I do not know if you could get an AE to sell you PSLs separately from full licenses. And if you could get them to sell one, what would they charge? It might be that they’d charge nearly as much for only a PSL as they were offering to charge for a full license + PSL.

Now You See It

Regardless, without a PSL assigned, even a full user can’t see the Industries objects. So any user that was going to “use Nonprofit Cloud,” in the sense of actually seeing any of the objects or fields that are part of that offering, will need a PSL. This will reduce your pool of PSLs compared to your pool of full user licenses. And keep in mind that “part of Nonprofit Cloud” also means the Industries-based program management offering, outcomes measurement, the upcoming volunteer management functions, etc.

I suspect that there’s probably no technical reason you couldn't assign a PSL to a platform license—it seems about the same as assigning one to an integration user. I can't test this assumption, however, because I don't currently have any clients on Nonprofit Cloud, much less any that also have a platform user.

Let me also note that currently, if you assign a PSL to an integration user, you already find yourself one short for assigning to humans. I asked about this problem at True to the Core during Dreamforce 2024 (and the same problem that applies to the Marketing User checkbox). I've been promised that a fix is coming, but not very soon.

Maybe Users Don't Need to See It

Of course, if you have an NPC org and some users that are going to do things that are not within the Industries objects, you should be able to use platform licenses to your heart’s content. Even if your configuration involves person accounts (due to that being a required part of NPC), platform users can handle it. (I set up a client with platform licenses and a person account setup before NPC even existed.)

I don't know if platform users could see Industries components on your page layouts (like Timeline, Interaction Summaries, or R2D2s). But maybe you just wouldn't use those components. Plenty of non-Industries Salesforce instances get along just fine without those components. Or they use AppExchange options that work as well or better. (I'm looking at you, Timeline.)

Money on the Line

If you are a wealthy or large enough organization to be considering NPC (or any other Industries product), then you've already made the choice that most of your user licenses are quite expensive ($720/year for NPC, much more for the for-profit offerings). Trying to save money by putting some users on platform licenses seems like it might not be the right question.

And, of course, I've argued more than once that small organizations are not a good fit for NPC (or other Industry clouds). So in that case it seems not really worth asking whether you can use platform licenses with NPC...