Salesforce Communities and Licenses
# BENEFITS OF COMMUNITIES:
1. Save Time
By creating a community platform for customers to share, you give your customers access to not only your knowledge base, but other (community members, employees and partners) thoughts.Communities can be used to share a subset of features and data from your internal Salesforce org. Communities can also be customized to use your company branding.
2. Save Money
By connecting your customers to other highly engaged customers, you’ll decrease the amount of tough questions coming into your customer service center. Customers will answer each other’s questions. Every call not connected to a live agent is a penny saved.
3. Strengthen Sales
By having a stronger connection to your customers’ likes, wants, and purchase histories, you can tailor future product offerings and content to them.
Remember:
# Data from your Community lives in your Salesforce org, and
# Data living in your Salesforce org can be shared through your Community.
Think of yourself as a master chef who is putting together a worthy meal .
Take :
- a dash of Salesforce Knowledge, Chatter Answers
- a dab of reports,
- a pinch of customer service,
- a bunch of features like Custom Features, Apps
Business Workflows
> a healthy dose of security, and a large portion of how Salesforce works.
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Partner portals + Customer Portals + additional features = COMMUNITIES
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Parter Portal: data related to partners who might be collaborating on opportunities etc.
Customer portal: exposing data to your customers with authentication(Login).
Sites: exposing pages without any authentication(Login).Although sites could leverage the login mechanism of Customer Portal.
Communities, you can streamline key businessprocesses and socialize them to the internal and external users you choose. Additionally, you canengage with external users on any record.
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Starting in Summer ’13, the partner portal is no longer available for organizations that aren’t currently using it. Existing organizations continue to have full access. If you don’t have a partner portal, but want to easily share records and information with your partners, try Communities. Existing organizations using partner portals may continue to use their partner portals or transition to Communities. Contact your Salesforce Account Executive for more information.
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# COMMUNITY LICENSES :
The licenses are categorized by External vs Internal.
External licenses : are those provided to users that are outside your organization Example :
1.) Customer Community,
2.) Customer Community Plus,
3.) Partner Community.
*****The Customer and Partner Community licenses were derived from the portal licenses.
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Internal licenses : are those provided to your Employees.
Example :
1.) Employee Community
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# LIMITS :
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# LOGIN BASED LICENSES:
With login-based licenses, you purchase an amount of monthly logins for your members. For instance, if you purchased 20K logins , you can use 20K logins every month. The logins consumed reset to 0 at the end of each calendar month.
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# TYPES OF TEMPLATES:
When you create your Community, you will get the choice of selecting one of these templates:
1. Aloha
Aloha is an adaptable App Launcher template that uses a single sign-on authentication for access, and allows users to quickly find applications and access them with ease.
2. Koa
Koa is optimized for mobile devices. It is a text-based template that allows users to search for and view articles, and contact support if they are unable to find what they need.
3. Kokua
Unlike Koa, Kokua is visually rich, self-service template that allows community members to search for and view articles, and contact support.
4. Napili (Customer Service)
Napili allows customers to search for and view articles, as well as post questions to the community. Like the other templates, contacting support is available.
5. Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce
Build a custom community using standard Salesforce structure and tabs that can be fully customized using Visualforce. Requires advanced setup and allows for flexible configuration.
Blog References: salesforce, help.salesforce, was.salesforce, success.salesforce
