Practical Guide to Salesforce Communities

Whether you are brand new to the world of Salesforce communities or you are looking to take your Community Cloud knowledge to the next level, this detailed guide will help you to build and manage a Salesforce community by leveraging the declarative power of the platform with clicks, not code.

Each Salesforce community is a part of a widespread ecosystem, with thousands of communities and millions of users active today on Community Cloud. Through valuable social and business tools, this online platform enables companies to empower and equip their customers, partners, and employees in new, powerful ways.

In this book, Philip Weinmeister, a Salesforce MVP and the first-ever recipient of the “Community Cloud MVP” Trailblazer award, leads you through the ins and outs of Salesforce communities and provides you with an array of best practices to deliver top-notch business portals on the Salesforce platform.

Practical Guide to Salesforce Communities is the first book to comprehensively cover this next-generation offering from Salesforce, providing real, actionable guidance to help individuals build effective and engaging online communities. The book takes you through the entire process: from planning and designing a community to configuration/build, setup, and administration, all the way to deployment. Detailed explanations are provided of key components, templates, and features such as Community Builder, Audience Targeting, Lightning Bolts, and much more. Additionally, considerations and best practices are covered, including valuable tips and insights.

What You’ll Learn

• Plan and design a community
• Conceptualize how employees, partners, and customers use and benefit from communities
• Assess available templates and make an informed selection decision
• Use Community Builder and Lightning components within a Lightning community template
• Apply topics and knowledge articles to a community to increase value and adoption
• Inject process automation into a community using Workflow, Flow, and Process Builder
• Create dynamic and personalized user experiences with audience targeting
• Build, export, and import unique templates with the Lightning Bolt solution framework
• Provide community data for members or community managers

Who This Book Is For

Salesforce administrators, Salesforce developers, Salesforce functional architects, Salesforce business analysts, and Salesforce community managers

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why Salesforce Communities?

Chapter 2: Planning and Preparing for Success

Chapter 3: Licenses and Member Groups: Employees, Partners, and Customers

Chapter 4: Community Template Types: Tabs,

Visualforce, and Lightning

Chapter 5: Community Builder for Lightning Communities

Chapter 6: Pages and Components in Lightning Communities

Chapter 7: Setup and Administration

Chapter 8: Access, Sharing, and Visibility

Chapter 9: Topics in Communities

Chapter 10: Community Knowledge (Articles)

Chapter 11: Process Automation in Communities

Chapter 12: Audience Targeting and Personalization

Chapter 13: Lightning Bolt for Communities

Chapter 14: The Best of the Rest: Additional Communities Topics

Chapter 15: Next Steps: Keep Learning

About the Author

Phil Weinmeister is the VP of Product Management at 7Summits, where he is focused on building innovative components, apps, and bolts that enable impactful, transformative communities on the Salesforce platform. He holds 20 Salesforce certifications and has delivered numerous Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and (primarily) Community Cloud solutions to a variety of organizations on Salesforce since 2010. Phil released Practical Guide to Salesforce Communities in 2018 and the latest edition of Practical Salesforce Development Without Code in 2019. He has been a Salesforce MVP since 2015 and, in 2017, was was named the first-ever “Community Cloud MVP” at the Lightning Bolt Trailblazer awards at Dreamforce.

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, with a double major in business administration/IT and Spanish, Phil now resides in Powder Springs, Georgia, USA. He spends most of his “free” time with his gorgeous, sweet wife, Amy, and his children, Tariku, Sophie, Max, and Lyla. When he’s not trying to make his kids laugh, cheering on the Arizona Cardinals, or rap-battling his wife, Phil enjoys traveling, playing various sports, and growing in his walk with Jesus.