Salesforce Communities Overview

What is Salesforce Communities?

Salesforce Communities is an online platform that enables rich collaboration between employees, customers, partners, suppliers and distributors. Organizations can create fully-branded public or private communities that connect members directly with each other – and with relevant content, data and business processes. Salesforce Communities is the only community platform that combines the power of social with mobile participation, trusted security, and direct connection to business processes.

Why did we create Salesforce Communities?

Today’s customer expects to interact with their favorite vendors, share experiences with other customers, and find the information they need from any mobile device. To meet these expectations, companies need to deepen customer relationships, understand rapidly-changing customer needs, and connect customers directly to their business processes. Communities was built to address all of these needs.

Communities go beyond portals by adding social collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile access while retaining both enterprise security and tight integration with business processes.

What types of communities does Salesforce support?

Salesforce provides two general types of communities that can be used for a broad variety of purposes, from customer service to marketing or engagement of resellers, suppliers and partners.

Customer Communities deliver rich collaboration, mobile access and consistent branding for even the largest groups. For example, a service community enables customers to answer questions for other customers, quickly find the information they need, or work with service reps to resolve issues – decreasing time to resolution while increasing engagement and loyalty.

Partner Communities provide even greater ties to business process along with the added power of role-based security to segment the data that’s been shared with different members. For example, partner communities enable companies to manage reseller relationships by keeping some lead and funding information private, but enabling collaborative selling between partners, leading to more engaged partners and increased deal flow.

What are the key features of Salesforce Communities?

No other communities platform offers the same combination of capabilities along with deep integration into business process. Key Communities features include:

Business Process Integration: members can create and collaborate on support cases, sales opportunities or campaigns from within the community

Social Collaboration: members can interact, collaborate on goals and form groups to support their interests

Branding/Customization: companies can design their community to match their brand and website look and feel. Content and navigation structure is highly customizable.

Mobility: members can access the community from any device, anywhere

Social Intelligence: relevant content and resources are suggested to each member based on their interests and behavior

Security & scalability: leveraging the trusted Salesforce platform, all data and member information is always safe -- no matter how many members you have

How are communities priced?

Customers make a unique purchase for each community. Partner and Customer Communities offer both a membership and login pricing model that determine cost based on the size of the community. Salesforce has greatly simplified portal-based pricing by creating pre-defined blocks of either member or login users per community.

If I own a Salesforce portal today, what happens?

We are excited about all the new capabilities of Salesforce Communities, but there are no plans to cease support of Salesforce portals. Existing portal customers will have Communities functionality provisioned at no additional cost. This will give you access to a rich Communities feature set immediately.

If I own an existing Portal License, what can I migrate to?

The following table describes the migration path:

If I don’t use Chatter, can I still use Communities?

Yes. Communities functionality is not dependent on the use of Chatter. You can still get the branding and mobile benefits of the solution along with other collaboration elements such as Ideas and Q & A.

When is Communities available? Where can I find more information?

Communities is generally available on June 15th. Go to www.salesforce.com/chatter/communities for more info or contact your sales rep.