Salesforce Communities – communities of ideas

Salesforce Communities opens up many opportunities : interaction with customer, building relationship with partners, information exchange between employees – all in one user-friendly out of the box functionality. Today we are going to throw the light on what makes the Community Cloud a platform of ideas.

Over many years companies have been looking for a solution providing effective collaboration functionality for ideas spreading, document exchange and customer & partner communication. The existing offerings were represented by multiple applications which, unfortunately, haven’t found favor with employees and even less of them were compatible with Salesforce platform. But things got different after Salesforce rolled out its Community Cloud to manage internal and external relationships.

Now you have a chance to develop a fully custom, branded Salesforce Community using Visualforce and plunge into the world of endless opportunities. We are ready to share our ideas on how to boost this amazing Salesforce cloud.

Idea #1: Be special.

It’s not a secret that every company strives to stand out of the crowd and deliver personalized solutions. Standard Salesforce Community look and feel is easy-to-use but lacks individuality. The Community designer allows you to add some personality to your  traditional Community using self-service templates, such as:

• a template for Knowledge articles organized by data categories;
• a text-based template for mobile devices enabling users to search for and view articles by text categories;
• a template for support communities with a functionality of posting question.

Idea #2: Visualise!

Seems that no good perception possible without following up information with images and videos. Salesforce improved Rich Text component in Communities and you cannot ignore it! Although embedded Youtube videos may appear quite static for you, it’s still a chance to communicate with your colleagues, partners, or clients way more effectively.

Idea #3: Engage a moderator.

Moderating your Community doesn’t mean limiting users’ freedom to communicate – however, involvement of a moderator can  facilitate engagement of an audience. Even more, moderation rules make it easier to manage your community using different feed types, such as polls, links and file names.

Idea #4: Go with Salesforce Chatter.

These amazing messaging tool is an absolute must-have in your Salesforce Community. Chat in groups, chat on personal feed, chat on specific objects feed, send direct messages – chat everywhere: it increases your users’ involvement and it’s fun!

Idea #5:  Start with a new feature.

Salesforce has recently introduced brand-new WordPress themes into Community Cloud which is undoubtedly a win for progressive users. But what is really great is that you can tailor it  to individual finance, healthcare, sales, or marketing relations use cases, to name a few. Here comes the Lightning Bolt framework which will be generally available for Salesforce developers in October 2016 with the opportunity to publish app solutions on AppExchange in 2017.

Still thinking if it is worthy? It’s time to make the first step and connect! Our Salesforce consultants are here for you to deal with complex Salesforce licensing and lead you to the unexplored corners of Salesforce Communities.