Sunday, March 22, 2015

Salesforce Communities - Part1

Communities are formed by the people who share and are engaged in collective learning. The members have a common passion for the things that they do and interact on everyday basis to make the experience even better.


A community can be incredibly valuable for your organization. Salesforce communities are online platform/space where internal, external employees, customers, partners can collaborate.The main advantage of communities is it lives inside your organization and you can decide which salesforce data you want to share with the community members. Customers can ask for help from online communities and internal support can assist them. They can also access online help from FAQ’s, knowledge, articles, ideas etc.



Security model for communities work in the similar fashion like your internal members. A separate profile can be created for partner portal members and the customers to provide access to apps, tabs, records and objects. 

With communities you can:
  • Get real time feedback
  • Ability to brand and customize your own experience with specific colors pictures etc.
  • Incorporating idea of social intelligence
  • Provide efficient self service
  • Educate partners to sell effectively
  • Give your customer more power and choices
  • Stay connected with your customer 24/7
  • Self-service for partners, customers and employees
  • Blend communities and business process on a single platform
  • Share documentation, files and collaborate.
  • Partners can get answers, engage post ideas and log cases
  • Find resources, answers, best practices and experts
  • The most powerful way to collaborate
  • Portals has been replaced by communities
Steps to Implement the Community in Salesforce:

Use Case:

1-2-3 SFDC Org would like to implement Communities in salesforce for their customers and partners. The Partners and customers should have following access in the community- Chatter, people, groups, accounts, contacts, cases, content, knowledge, libraries, badges, recognition etc. 


Step1: Enable Salesforces Communities and select the domain:

Go to Customize > Communities > Settings and enable communities,the very first step of implementing communities in salesforce is to enable a community for your org. As soon as you check the enable box, salesforce will prompt you to select a unique community domain name. It will automatically prompt if the domain name is available. 


Once you enable the community it cannot be undone. 

You are now ready to create your community

Step2:

Choose an appropriate template from the given options below. We will be using NAPILI template for our use case because we are planning to provide the access to the knowledge that we implemented in our previous posts. Salesforce provides various types of templates- Kokua, Koa, Napili, Aloha and Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce. 




Step 3: Let us enable the global header
You might want to provide access to the global header for the internal users to easily switch back and forth between internal and the external community. This can be done by providing custom permissions to the users -Setup, click Manage Users > Permission Sets or by providing “View Global Header” access from the profile. 


Community Management Page
Community Management page is used by the admins to do the configurations settings required for the community page. The options available in Community Management are based on your community template selection, permissions, and preferences. Following options are all limited to the Napili template. 

Community Management Page can also be accessed from the global header, to access this page you must be logged into the community. All the options that you see in the community are based on the selection of the community template permissions etc. 



Now that we have selected the template,we are all set to manage our community options,In our next post we will learn the various options available under Napili template in salesforce.

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