Set Up and Manage Salesforce Communities

Introduction

Communities we create works as an important way of sharing information between people who are part of our business i.e. employees, partners, and customers. As you all know, there are various ways we can call it a support forum or online portal, etc.

Before you move on have a note Communities are not used in all orgs of Salesforce Classic while in Lightning Experience we can.

Usage of Communities

1. As all people involved in business processes are available on community platforms, it's easy to increase sales by creating suitable connections between people.
2. Provide better satisfaction to Customers by giving solutions possible on a single platform.

One of the best solutions to manage your activities on the Community platform is by using Salesforce Lightning Community which comes with in-built templates with drag-and-drop functionality.

Don't forget to check out: Problem Solving | Salesforce Project Implementation

Overview of Salesforce Community

• Salesforce Communities are a great medium to share information. Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support site, HR central, or something else, an online community is a great place to connect with the important folks in your life in a new and different way. You can use pre-Configured Lightning templates or create customized templates with Visualforce pages.

• We already knew we have different kinds of communities to which we connect as per the business requirements. For example, we can create one community for support of Customer Support to reduce the cost by understanding the Customer through this community, and also further planning cost can be reduced if requirements are clear to both sides.

Community SetUp

There are various steps required for the setup of the Community and also there are certain tasks that should be done carefully because they are irreversible.

Enable Salesforce Communities

This is the first step for creating a community.

Remember:

1. After you enable Communities, you can’t disable it. So it is good to enable it in your Trailhead Playground.
2. If you don’t see this menu, Communities might not be available for your Salesforce org.
3.  You are not allowed to change the name of the domain name after setting it up so think carefully before saving it.

Step 1: From Setup, enter Communities Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Communities Settings.

Step 2: Select Enable communities.

Step 3: Pick a name for your domain for your communities, and click on Check Availability to make sure that it is available. You can choose the name as mentioned in the below example.

For example, if your Communities domain name is Cloudfry.force.com and you’re creating a customer community, you can enter customers to create the unique URL Cloudfry.force.com/customers  

Check out another amazing blog by Deepak here: Standard and Custom Percentage Calculator in Salesforce Lightning Component

Step 4: Click Save.

Salesforce Communities not only provide interactions among business perspectives but also provide complete security from various attacks like Clickjacking which sometimes take users to other websites that can harm their resources through various means. It also encrypts confidential data or any confidential information related to business processes. 

Congrats you just enable your option for creating Community safely in Salesforce.