External organization-wide defaults provides separate organization-wide defaults for internal and external users. It simplifies your sharing rules configuration and improve recalculation performance. Additionally, administrators can easily see which information is being shared to portals and other external users.

Separate organization-wide defaults is available for these objects.

• Accounts and their associated contracts and assets
• Cases
• Contacts
• Opportunities
• Custom Objects
• Users

External users include:

• Authenticated Website users
• Chatter External Users
• Customer Portal users
• Guest users
• High-Volume Portal Users
• Partner Portal users
• Service Cloud Portal users