Thinking about building a portal for your own customers or dealers? Here’s the inside scoop on some important facts you should understand and know about the Experience Cloud: 

Be it be any CRM, no matter on what technology it is built on, no matter on which platform it is deployed, it is always created with one goal i.e. to improve Customer Relationships and to provide a stand-alone platform to companies to perform all CRM activities.

Salesforce is well known and is the most used CRM Platform today. While Salesforce comes with a minimum $25 portal license (Full Licences Cost Varies with Edition) today to login into Salesforce and access data, it also gives another level of accessibility of data outside salesforce for Customers and Partners with the concept of Communities. 

WHAT AND WHY COMMUNITIES?

Community Cloud, as the name suggests, is a Salesforce platform that gives companies the tools to create branded online Web Application/ Website to exchange Salesforce Internal data to another salesforce platform access by a different sets of users. Through these communities, companies can open up communication and collaboration channels with customers, partners and employees like never before. Now, we know that in Communities we can show the data to external users but security? correct, this data is not accessed by external users directly but via Community licensed users managed in the Salesforce Org. However, communities Lightning/ Visualforce custom development gives complete privileges to show data and provide as much customization on public communities as well. 

With Salesforce Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Salesforce we can build up to 100 free public communities, but to provide secured access on communities sites to the external user’s licenses are required to be bought. Which licenses to suits your business model? It really depends on whom you want to give access to your data.

COMMUNITY LICENSES

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.

Customer Community 

For External User. Quickly build connected customer portals, service communities, and help centers.

$2/login or $5/member/month

Customer Community Plus

For External User. Deliver complex portals with advanced sharing, delegated administration, reports, and dashboards.

$6/login or $15/member/month

Partner Community

For External and Internal User . Dedicated to the Partner, or the Internal business user. Boost partner sales with Sales Cloud PRM, a complete channel management solution.

$10/login or $25/member/month

POSSIBILITIES?

Some of the very common use cases in the Salesforce Community are-

1. Employee Portals
2. Customer Service Portals
3. Customer Knowledge Portal
4. E-Commerce Web Applications
5. Booking Portals
6.  

The real power of communities lies in the fact of the capabilities to integrate it with any third-party applications same as salesforce. With Integrations, you can have possibilities of connecting community sites with any external databases like Inventory Management, Product Master Database, or applications like Payment Merchants, etc.   

NOTES AND FACTS:

1. Support SSO Logins
2. Reusable Lightning Components
3. Native Plug and Play Community Components
4. On-Demand Buy Salesforce Community Licenses.
5. Mobile Enabled
6. Complete Custom Domain Name for Salesforce Community so your customers or Partners don’t get even the idea that they are logging into Salesforce Cloud.
7. Supports Sandbox Development
8. Out of the Box Community Templates

Additional Handy Resources

Here is more specific information about communities, including standard pricing, licensing, different editions, and notes on deployments:

Overview: https://www.salesforce.com/products/community-cloud/overview/

Pricing: https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/community-cloud/

Editions and Types: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=users_license_types_communities.htm

Domains: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_enable.htm

Deploying: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=networks_migrate_considerations.htm

Templates: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=siteforce_commtemp_intro.htm

Have other questions or want to talk directly with a Salesforce expert? Reach out anytime. We’ll be happy to help.

www.melonleaf.com