Experience Cloud :

• Salesforce Experience Cloud is a social platform that helps businesses connect customers, partners, and employees to work together and share information.

What is community ?

• Community Cloud was the original name for Salesforce's platform that allowed organizations to create branded online communities. It provided a way for users to collaborate, share information, and interact with each other and the organization.

• Use Cases: Commonly used for customer service portals, partner portals, and employee communities.

In essence, Experience Cloud is an evolution of Community Cloud, designed to provide more flexibility and a broader range of tools for creating personalized digital experiences for users.

Community Cloud Templates:

• Community Cloud templates (now part of Experience Cloud) are essentially pre-built templates for creating Experience Sites in Salesforce. They provide a ready-made structure and design elements that you can use as a foundation for your community.

  1. Customer Service (Customer Account Portal): Designed to support customer service needs.

  2. Partner Central: Built for partner relationship management, this template supports sales and service collaboration between businesses and their partners.

  3. Customer Portal: Provides a basic setup for users to access their accounts, submit support requests, and find resources like knowledge articles.

  4. Help Center: A straightforward template that emphasizes self-service, allowing customers to browse knowledge articles, access FAQs, and submit cases.

Different types of communities:

As we know Communities (now primarily referred to as Experience Cloud sites) are online platforms that facilitate interaction, collaboration, and engagement among users. Here are some types.

1. Customer Community:

   • Purpose: Designed for customer engagement, self-service, and support.

   • Use Cases:

     • Enable customers to find answers to questions through knowledge articles, FAQs, and community discussions.

   • Common Templates: Customer Service, Help Center.

2. Partner Community:

   • Purpose: Facilitates collaboration and engagement with business partners.

   • Use Cases:

     • Collaborate with partners on lead sharing, deal registration, and sales planning.

   • Common Templates: Partner Central.

3. Employee Community

   • Purpose: Supports internal communication, collaboration, and engagement among employees.

   • Use Cases:

     • Facilitate onboarding and training by providing access to HR resources, company documents, and training materials.

   • Common Templates: Employee Community, Build Your Own (for more custom needs).

4. Partner Portal

   • Purpose: Similar to Partner Community but often designed specifically for deeper channel management and sales processes.

   • Use Cases:

     • Allows partners to work with you on co-selling, lead sharing, and account planning.

   • Common Templates: Similar to Partner Central, with customizable add-ons.

Creating and Managing Communities

Creating and managing communities in Salesforce involves setting up a digital environment, configuring permissions, customizing the user interface. Here’s a step-by-step overview of how to create, configure, and manage a Salesforce community.

1. Setting Up a Community :

   • Access Experience Cloud: Go to Setup in Salesforce, search for All Sites or Digital Experiences (formerly Community Settings), and enable Digital Experiences if it isn’t already enabled.

   • Create a New Site:

     • Click on New under All Sites.

     • Choose a community template based on your needs (e.g., Customer Service, Partner Central, Help Center).

     • Provide a name for the community and configure the URL.

   • Customize the Community:

     • Open the site in Experience Builder to customize its look and feel.

     • Add branding elements, such as logos, colors, and themes, to align the site with your organization’s branding.

2. Customizing the User Interface :

   • Experience Builder Customization:

     • Use Experience Builder to add, remove, and arrange components (e.g., dashboards, cases, knowledge articles).

   • Add Standard Components:

     • Add components like Search, Case Submission etc.

   • Enable Personalization:

     • Use Audience Targeting to display specific content or components based on user profiles or criteria.

3. Publishing and Activating the Community

   • Review and Test: Before going live, preview the community and test it with sample users to ensure the layout, navigation, and access permissions work as expected.

   • Activate the Community:

     • Once everything is ready, click on Publish to make the community live.

     • Set the community status to Active to allow users to access it.

Above image represents Experience Builder

Above Image represents Workspace

How to add users experience site

To add user’s to experience site there are several ways :

1. Direct Creation by Admin (Manual User Creation):

   • First create a Account then under that Account create a Contact. This contact will be the user of experience site. To do so follow this

     • You need to switch to classic and then under user choose “Enable Customer User“.

     • Then a user info UI will open then add all the details.

     • Set the User License to a community license (e.g., Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, or Partner Community).

     • You will see the checkbox related to “Welcome email” for resetting password, do check it. This will send an email to user so that user can set password for first time.

2. Self-Registration by Users:

   • Self-registration allows users to sign up for the community on their own by filling out a registration form on the community login page.

   • Admins can set up self-registration through Experience Builder > Login & Registration, where they can customize the self-registration form and define default profiles and roles.

3. Invitation by Admin (Send Invite):

   • Process:

     • Admins can invite users to join the community by sending email invitations from Experience Workspaces > Administration > Members > Send Invites.

     • Users receive an email with a link to complete their registration and create a password.

     • This method allows admins to control who joins the community while enabling new users to complete registration themselves.

License for Experience Cloud

• Salesforce Experience Cloud offers various licenses that control the level of access and features available to users in a community.

• Each license type is designed to suit different types of users, such as customers, partners, and employees, with specific permissions tailored to the tasks they need to perform.

1. Customer Community License

   • Purpose: For basic access to customer communities.

   • Features: Ideal for users who need access to basic support resources and limited interaction, like creating support cases and viewing knowledge articles.

   • Use Case: A customer who wants self-service access to support articles and case management tools without access to advanced CRM features.

2. Customer Community Plus License

   • Purpose: For customers who need more extensive access and collaboration capabilities.

   • Features: Includes everything in the Customer Community license, plus additional features like reports, dashboards, and the ability to share records with other users.

3. Partner Community License

   • Purpose: For partner organizations (resellers, vendors) who collaborate with your business on sales, lead, and opportunity management.

   • Features: Provides access to sales and CRM objects, including Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, and Contacts.

4. External Apps License

   • Purpose: For customers who need access to custom apps and data, usually in cases where more customization is needed for specific external-facing applications.

   • Features: Provides flexible access to custom objects and specific standard objects.

5. Employee Community License (Also known as Salesforce Platform License for internal employees)

   • Purpose: For internal users (employees) who need access to the community to collaborate on internal processes but don't require full CRM access.

   • Features: Provides access to custom objects and a limited set of standard objects.

   • Use Case: An employee collaborating on internal tasks, sharing resources, or working on non-CRM-focused applications, such as HR or internal project management.

Security and Sharing model in Experience Cloud

What are Profiles?

• Profiles in Salesforce define the baseline permissions a user has. They control what a user can do with objects (like Cases, Accounts, or Knowledge), fields, and tabs within Salesforce.

• For example, in a Customer Support Community, a Customer Community User Profile might be configured to:

  • Read knowledge articles.

  • Create and Edit their own cases.

  • View limited contact information.

• By granting specific profiles to community members, you ensure they can access only what’s appropriate for their role in the community.

What are Roles?

• Roles determine data visibility based on the hierarchy in an organization. Roles work together with the sharing settings to control which records a user can see.

• In a support community, you could have roles like Support Agent or Support Manager:

  • Support Agents may only see cases they are working on.

  • Support Managers might see cases from all agents they supervise.

Why Assign Profiles and Roles?

• Assigning appropriate profiles and roles allows for segregation of access. It ensures that users can only see, edit, or delete records and fields relevant to their role in the community, securing sensitive or irrelevant information.

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Establishing a Security and Sharing Model

Key Components of the Security and Sharing Model:

1. Organization-Wide Defaults (OWD):

   • OWD sets the baseline level of access for each object. For example:

   • Private OWD for Cases means users can only see their cases unless additional sharing rules grant broader access.

   • Public Read-Only OWD for Knowledge allows all users to view articles but not modify them.

2. Sharing Rules:

   • Sharing rules provide additional access to specific records based on criteria or ownership.

   • For instance, in a support community, sharing rules can allow customers to see cases related to their account, even if they didn’t create them.

3. Field-Level Security:

   • Field-level security restricts access to specific fields on an object, even if the user can see the object.

   • For example, community members might have access to the Case object, but field-level security can hide sensitive fields like Internal Notes from them.

4. Permission Sets (optional):

   • Permission sets grant additional permissions above what’s defined by a user’s profile.

   • You might use permission sets to give certain community users, like premium support customers, additional access to resources.

Example Scenario:

In a Customer Support Community, here’s how profiles, roles, and a security/sharing model might be implemented:

• Profiles:

  • Assign the Customer Community User Profile to all customer members, allowing them to create and view their own cases and read knowledge articles.

• Roles:

  • Assign a Customer Role that allows customers to see cases related to their account but not cases from other accounts.

  • Assign a Support Manager Role to internal users who need to see cases from all accounts they supervise.

• Security and Sharing:

  • Set OWD for Cases to Private, so customers only see their own cases by default.

  • Set OWD for Knowledge to Public Read-Only to allow all users to view articles.

  • Create a Sharing Rule to allow community members with the same Account to view cases for that account.

This setup ensures that each member of the community sees and interacts only with the data they need, enhancing security and user experience.

What is Audience