my experiments with Salesforce.com: Managing Salesforce Communities

Community is a collaborative platform component that allows us to expose data to the external as well as internal employees. This is a one page stop for the admins to manage and monitor the community activity. With communities you can increase branding, loyalty, get customer feedback from chatter, ideas, reduce your cases by enabling knowledge articles and promote employee collaboration

Let us study in details how to manage Salesforce Community-

To manage community go to Build-> Customize -> Communities->All community

1: Status: Manage the status of your community to active or inactive.

2: Customize Template: This section will show the current selection of the template for your community. You can always switch the template if required from customize template section.

3: Select Dashboard: Dashboards provide vital information on memberships, logins, and activity. Select customize and map the dashboards that you want to view to the community managers. You can also download salesforce dashboard package from the App Exchange.

4: Create Reputation Levels: Reputation levels are set to promote the activities in a community and motivate the community members. Members who are more active in the community gain more points. In this section you can set the points, range and levels. Users can move up in the level by earning more points

5: Select Members: Restrict the community access by limiting the profile, similarly users can be provided access by permission sets.

6: Dashboard Settings: Dashboard Mapping can be done here to display the selected data.

7: Topics: Topics is grouping of records around a common theme.

8: Reputation: Reputation is directly proportional to your activity in the community. The more you share, post, comment, help others by answering questions the better your reputation level becomes.

9: Administration: This is the integral part of the manage community where you can set various options like branding your community, customizing tabs, members etc.

Provide access to the community Members:

Salesforce has consolidated all the required settings for the communities under “Manage “which makes it so much easier for admins to do their jobs. Let us provide access to the users to our community. Users can belong to various roles and profiles.

Get your community URL from Build > Customize > Communities > All Communities and get the network id. Now get the profile id and create a csv file with columns (networkId, parentId) as shown in the screenshot.

Parent id can contain permission set, profile id, role id etc. Once the file is uploaded members will be able to access the community management section. To find the network id of your salesforce community

As we know that the manage options displayed in the manage section of the community changes with the template selection. The options that we see on the on the left Palette is tailored to the Napili template and these might change once you change the template for your community. Please refer the below screen shot to know the Napili Miscellaneous options in detail.

Manage Topics in Communities

There are three options available under topics- New topics can be created and more than one can be combined to merge into one. Articles can be added to the navigational topics for users in communities. The main topics that you want to display on the community home page can be managed here.