5 Things You Need to Know About Salesforce Communities

As a Salesforce Partners, we like to work with the entire gamut of Salesforce solutions. especially , many of our technical consultants concentrate on Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Communities (among other things).

Communities happen to be one among my favorite offerings to figure with and implement. They’re rich in features, and that they can quickly help connect a business to its customers and the other way around . Click Here - https://hicglobalsolutions.com/ If You Are Looking For Salesforce Implementation Partners Thinking about getting started with a community for your own customers or dealers? Here’s the within scoop on five belongings you should know: #1: Licensing: Different Editions & Types Salesforce licensing for external community users comes in basically three main editions: Customer, Partner and Lightning External. Within each edition, there are two types: Member-Based and Login-Based. Tip: consider the three editions as level of access and therefore the types as how often the community are going to be used. The Editions Customer (aka Self-Service) – I consider this the minimum needed for external access and collaboration, but note that even without specific licenses, external people can still have some access to a community. A support portal would be the prime example here, e.g. if you would like users to be ready to create a case and access knowledge articles. Partner – This next level is meant for B2B interactions where you would like to tug in sales data also . this is often basically a PRM (Partner Relationship Management) license. Lightning External – This edition offers a more custom experience for nearly anyone. this might be wont to create a customer forum, display data external to Salesforce, or build full enterprise portals that handle everyone. Note: Both Customer and Lightning External technically have two options each themselves – Standard and Plus – that allow further granularity for accessing different objects within the Org. The Types Member-Based – This license type is far like other standard Salesforce license types. It’s generally a better fixed monthly amount per license, and therefore the user assigned with it can log in as repeatedly as they need to. Login-Based – This license is best for those external users who might only login 1-3 times a month to see something. The purchasing is different, too. With Member-Based, the corporate purchases a license for a way many users are going to be accessing the community. With Login-Based, however, the corporate purchases variety of logins per month. Users who are assigned this license type then consume one among these logins every day they check in . The way the licenses show up in your Org is additionally unique: it’s a 1 to twenty ratio. So, if you buy 1,000 logins per month, the org will get provisioned 20,000 login licenses that you simply assign to specific users. #2: name While each Org can have up to 100 communities, each with their own unique aliased name , the Org itself will have a default name that it uses for the bottom URL for all communities. this is often a *.force.com domain like businessname.force.com. All communities will have a corresponding URL under this main domain as default: businessname.force.com/customers businessname.force.com/support businessname.force.com/partners This domain *.force.com can't be changed after you’ve enabled communities in your Org. While those URLs are great for testing, they aren’t the simplest for getting your name and brand out there on its own. Brainstorm ideas for what the domain are going to be once the community is launched, but also plan for the longer term . Subdomains i feel are the simplest option here. So carrying on with the above example, let’s pretend our company’s public website is www.businessname.com. an honest support community domain could then be: support.businessname.com. Using subdomains for every community saves you the value of shopping for more Top Level Domains for every community, and it keeps your communities linked to your main website, too. #3: Sandboxes As with many things in Salesforce, creating a community during a sandbox rather than production may be a safer thanks to build and test your ideas. this may also allow any code development that's needed to be brought in also , like Lightning Components, custom triggers and such. #4: Deployments If you’ve created or updated the community during a sandbox, you’ll eventually want it to be in production. Deploying a community – or, more precisely, community components – are often a touch tricky. Here are some things to stay in mind: Deploying a community can delete pages. Usually deployments are additive only, but when deploying the most components of the community, it overrides that structure completely. meaning pages removed in sandbox are going to be faraway from production. Changing the whole community template won’t deploy. If you modify the template in sandbox, manually change it in production first before you deploy the community components. Deploy profiles and permission sets with the components. like Custom fields and Objects, if you would like permissions to return along, you’ll got to include those Profiles within the Change Set or Package, too. Audience targeting is additionally manual. If you've got certain pages set to point out to certain audiences, those settings will got to be manually found out again after deployment. Note: there are more caveats and gotchas that Salesforce has compiled during a nice list that I’ll include within the links at the top of this post.

#5: Templates Salesforce communities accompany several out-of-the-box templates that offer you an excellent launching point to start out your community. All are often customized and branded to suit your corporate colors and logos. The templates range from help centers to partner portals to even a basic app launcher to leverage Salesforce as one Sign-On point for other applications. In some cases, your company might need a fast turnaround for getting a more full and rich community set-up. Maybe you would like a community which will allow users to submit ideas and vote on them. or even it’s something that might be considered standard for your entire industry like communicating sales quotas and forecasting data to your network of dealers. Salesforce partners like Perficient have created Lightning Bolt Solutions which will kickstart your community and help get you to the finishing line faster, also as match you with a partner who can help accelerate your business goals.