Salesforce Community

• Communities are a great way to share information and collaborate with people who are key to your business processes, such as customers, partners, or employees. 

• Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support site, or something else, a community is a beautifully branded digital experience connected to your CRM. Community Cloud makes it easy to create these experiences, engage customers, and empower partners.

• You can create multiple communities and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes—and many companies do just that. Since communities live in your Salesforce org, you can choose exactly how customers and partners access content and data.

The Community Cloud Advantage

• As the community is built on top of Salesforce so security features are provided by default.

• Create multiple experiences for specific needs like HR portal, Customer Community, Partner community

• Community Data live in Salesforce

• Extend business processes to partners and customers.

• Integrate data (such as orders or financial information) from third-party providers.

• Use themes and templates to create beautiful branded experiences.

• Use Salesforce CMS to create content and deliver to any channel.

Communities User Licenses

A user license determines the baseline of features that the user can access. Every user must have exactly one user license. You can view the user licenses that your company has purchased to know what you have available to assign to your users.

There are three types of licenses in the community:

1. Customer Community License

• Customer Community Licenses get a basic feature.

• If external users who need access to case objects or knowledge, you can use a customer community license.

• It includes High Volume Customer Portal, Service Cloud Portal, Authenticated Sites Portal.

• Customer Community Licenses can’t have roles, hence they can’t take advantage of role-based sharing, and sharing set is used for them.

2. Customer Community Plus

• If your community members need access to below, Then you probably need Customer Community Plus Licenses

• Reports and dashboards

• Delegated admin

• Content libraries

• Records across accounts

• Salesforce normal sharing rule works for Custom Community Plus.

3. Partner Community

• If In addition to the above (Customer Community Plus), do your community members also need access to the below object, Then you probably need Partner Community Licenses

• Leads and opportunities

• Campaigns

• Salesforce normal sharing rule works

In short, Customer Community Licenses get a basic pass, just like an economy ticket. Customer Community Plus Licenses get more access, like business travelers. Partner Community Licenses get way more access, pretty much like first-class travelers.

How to configure a community?

1. Enable communities

• Setup, enter Communities in the Quick Find box, then select Communities Settings

• Create a unique domain

2. Create a new community-

• Enter Communities in Quick Find, and select All Communities.

• While creating the community, you can choose a predefined template or you can also select “Build your own” template

• Now you have community with preview status means community is not live

 

Now you have workspaces to customize your community as per the requirement.

3. Enabled a partner

• Go to Account and click to Manage External Account and Enable a partner

• Once an account is enabled as a partner, it appears in reports and list views that are filtered on the isPartner field. Also, partner users can be created from the contacts associated with this account

4. Create the contact under Partner Account

5. Enable Partner user from the contact-

• Before enabling, partner profile should be added to community from workspace “Administration Setting”

• Partner account owner should be linked with Role

Sharing in Communities

Communities are designed for salesforce external users. Sharing is caring, however, the way of sharing in a community cloud has different challenges. 

Customer Community License has a much more limited level of access to the community’s objects compared to other community license holders and Salesforce internal org users. Because these license holders do not have roles within Salesforce, so they can’t take advantage of role-based sharing. 

By default, members with a Customer Community License can see only their own records, such as the cases they file with support. They can’t see anyone else’s cases in the community.

Customer Community User licenses utilize two entirely new mechanisms.

1. Sharing Sets determine what records are shared with community users. A sharing set gives community users access to records that are associated with their accounts or contacts based on their user profile. Records can be exposed if they are related (directly or indirectly) to the user’s contact or account. For example, a user can see the cases that he or she raised because they are related to the same contact. The admin can set up only one sharing set per profile per object.

2. Sharing Groups determine who can see records owned by community users (high-volume portal). A sharing group allows you to share records owned by Customer Community License holders with internal and external users in your community. For example, European users who raise cases could have those cases shared with EMEA support agents. Deactivating a share group removes all other users’ access to records owned by the high-volume community or portal users.

Note- Sharing sets and groups are configured in Communities Settings, rather than the standard sharing configuration page.

What is a Partner super user?

You can grant superuser access to the external users if he/she belongs to Partner Community or a Customer Community Plus license. Granting super user access to external users in your community lets them access more data and records, regardless of sharing rules and organization-wide defaults. Super users can access data owned by other partner users who have the same role or a role below them. Super user access applies to cases, leads, custom objects, and opportunities only.