This document provides an overview of Salesforce Communities including:
- Communities allow internal and external users to connect and collaborate through common goals and sharing information.
- Examples of communities include customer support, partner, employee, and project management communities.
- Key features of communities include unified platforms, collaboration, customization, and mobile access.
- The document reviews the differences between communities and older portal features, and provides steps for setting up and customizing new communities.
2. Agenda
Introduction to Salesforce Communities
Community Examples
Partner Portal Overview
Customer Portal Overview
Why to Migrate from Portals to Communities
Features Which Behaves Differently in Communities and Portal
Set Up Communities
Steps for Creating New Communities
3. Company
Partner
Customer
Employee
At the basic level, a community is a group of people
connecting around a common mission or goal. They can
share information and collaborate among themselves
Communities combines the power of the Force.com platform,
Site.com branding, and Chatter collaboration.
Communities contains the functionality available in partner
portals and Customer Portals, plus many additional features.
Salesforce Communities
4. Share Information
Unified Platform
Collaboration
Branding/Customization
Mobile
Whether team members need to share files, qualify leads, or resolve support cases,
Community Cloud allows them to collaborate on business-critical files from within
the community.
Follow and collaborate with the people and groups that you care about most. With
real-time feeds, your teams will work together on fast-moving issues to close deals,
resolve customers cases, and deploy marketing campaigns.
Customize your community with your brand elements as well as content. Create a
look and feel that makes Community Cloud an extension of your corporate website.
Mobiles support means that Community Cloud is accessible anywhere, from any
device. The mobile experience combines an elegant, easy-to-use interface with
powerful Salesforce functionality.
Members can belong to multiple communities and easily toggle between them all
through a single sign-on. Create as many communities as you need within the same
platform.
Salesforce Communities
5. Customer Community Partner Community
Company Community
Project Management
Community
A customer community may guide customers on
how to get answers, how to log a case with
customer support, how to submit an idea, and
more.
A project management community may bring
project managers, their team, and customers
together to collaborate on projects and maintain
project cost accounting.
A partner community may enable partners to
collaborate on leads or prospects and
opportunities or deals.
A company community may guide employees on
how to get HR information, book travel, file a PTO
request, file a help desk request, and more.
Community Examples
6. Partner
Portal
Boost Sales through your
channel partners
Enable SSO or login
through separate login URL
Contribute to community
(Questions, Ideas & answers)
Customize portal branding
(UI)
Control access to
information(Campaign,
leads, opportunities,
custom objects)
Partner Portal Overview
7. Each company with which you partner should be added to Salesforce as a business account.
Channel managers are associated with partner accounts by account ownership.
Enable Business account as partner.
Once you have a partner account created, you can add partner users to the account as contact
records.
Enable Partner User from contact record. This will create user in salesforce with partner user
profile related to partner license.
Based on their profile access, partner users can access information and work on them
Partner Portal Overview
9. Why Migrate from Portals to Communities?
Templates you can use to quickly and easily build a self-service community that gives customers the same
visual and functional experience whether they use a tablet, a mobile device, or their desktop.
Use of Site.com to create branded public and private pages
Chatter
Management of community members using permission sets
Single sign-on for internal and external users, and support for multiple identity providers
Mobile access using Salesforce1
10. Features Which Behaves Differently in
Communities and Portal (Partner & Customer)
• Community access can be granted to any type of user, including internal users and portal or
community users.
• The membership model supports permission sets or profiles.
• Internal users with the “Manage External Users” permission can manage both partner users and
customer users (assuming the user also has Read on Accounts).
Membership
& User
Management
• If Chatter is enabled in your organization, there is a global search box at the top of the page instead of
the sidebar search that was available in your portal. If Chatter is disabled, a sidebar search box appears.
Search (with
Chatter
enabled)
• A portal ID is not required to log in to a community. An external user just needs the URL. For example, if
acme is your domain name and your community name is partner, the login URL for your community
would look like this: http://acme.force.com/partner/login.
Login
• If you’re using Visualforce pages, the existing hard-coded paths won’t work. You must update the paths
with the correct URL for your community.
• If your organization has Apex triggers on Chatter posts or comments, when you enable Communities
the triggers will automatically apply to all communities created within your organization.
Visualforce,
Apex Pages &
Apex triggers
11. Set Up Communities
Enable Communities from Communities Settings.
Select a domain name to use for your communities.
After enabling Communities, give the “View Global Header” permission to internal users who need access to
the community.
12. Set Up Communities
“Create and Set Up Communities” permission is required to create and customize communities.
Grant High-Volume Community Users Access to Records using Sharing Set.
A sharing set grants high-volume users access to any record associated with an account or contact
that matches the user’s account or contact.
For Example: For example, to grant access to all cases associated with an account identified on the
user’s contact record, select Contact.Account and Account respectively.
13. Set Up Communities
After creating a sharing set, create share groups to give other users access to records created by high-volume
community users. Share groups allow you to share records owned by high-volume community users with
internal and external users in your communities.
14. • The Community Creation wizard appears provides different templates (Kokua, koa, Napili, Aloha,
Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce) options for you to choose from.
Create
Community
• To add members using profiles.
• To add members using permission sets.
Add Members
to Community
• If you’re using the Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce template, you can add tabs to your community.
• Lightning Component tabs aren’t supported in Communities.
• Chatter Free users in your community don’t see any tabs except the Chatter tab
Add tabs to
Community
• Select Color Scheme to select from predefined color schemes or click the text box next to the page
section fields to select a color from the color picker.
• choose a header and footer for the community.
• Customize Login, Logout, and Self-Registration Pages in Your Community.
Brand Your
Community
• Chatter Answers
• Ideas
Enable
Additional
Features
Steps for Creating New Communities
15. Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce vs. Community Builder
Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce Community Builder
Pros:
Some theming options available out-of-the-
box for tabs
Support for all sales, service, marketing, and
platform features
Full Force.com platform capability
Cons:
Visualforce is the preferred approach for
better customization, yet Visualforce requires
coding capability
Requires some knowledge of the Force.com
platform
Pros:
Out-of-box app targeted at self-service
communities
More CSS styles available
Great for a quick rollout of simple self-service
community use case
Cons:
Limited to self-service functionality (cases,
Salesforce Knowledge, and Chatter Questions)
Doesn’t support other sales, service, or
platform use cases
Doesn’t have full platform capability
Selecting one of the preconfigured templates when creating
your community means that you will use the WYSIWYG
user interface of the Community Builder.
Selecting the Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce template
when creating your community means you will use
out-of-the-box Salesforce tabs or Visualforce pages.