Community Cloud – What is it? Advantages, Disadvantages and an Example

In this post, we explain what the Salesforce Community / Experience Cloud is. We also provide an example of its use and highlight some of its advantages and disadvantages. In summary, we believe that it is the optimal solution for most use cases. However, we also present an alternative at the end: a custom application developed just for you. Heroku Connect can help with this. With Heroku Connect, you can sometimes better meet highly individual requirements because you have more flexibility.

Salesforce Community / Experience Cloud – What is it?

Our CEO, Konstantin, says:

The Community Cloud is the 360-degree solution that Salesforce has been working towards: Here we can connect customers, partners, and employees.

Dr.-Ing. Konstantin Teplinskiy CEO & FOUNDER

Initially, the Salesforce Community Cloud was renamed to Experience Cloud. The reason is that it is more than just a community. With it, you create a whole digital experience: portals, forums, websites, mobile apps, or even help centers. [1,2] One could even say that access to the Community is a more affordable Salesforce access with a few features less.

An important component remains to form communities. These exist between and with customers, partners, or even employees. They facilitate communication for them and you.

To do this, the Community Cloud uses the social CRM platform Chatter. This enables chatting and screen sharing. Additionally, everything is always perfectly connected to your CRM. Customers can communicate with other customers and exchange information. Just as your employees can exchange information about HR management or communicate regarding frequently asked questions.

In our view, the biggest advantage is that all users of the portal access the same database. This ensures that all information is always synchronized.

But that was a bit abstract. Let’s look at a relevant example.

Example – the Cloudwharf Community Cloud

We also use the Salesforce Experience Cloud.

The Community Cloud as an interface between support and customer

Primarily, it is for us an interface between our support and our customers. The latter simply receive access from us. Then they can intuitively create support requests within the Community (see screenshot below). We can then work with the tickets internally and have all the information directly in Salesforce.

The Community Cloud for license management

This is also where our entire license business takes place. Customers can easily purchase a license for our sevdesk for Salesforce application. They also manage their existing licenses there. Here is an example:

And the best part is that we automatically generate all financial documents from Salesforce.

The Community Cloud as a public knowledge base

The Community also contains a lot of important information for all customers and potentially interested parties. For example, information on installing our sevdesk for Salesforce application:

This alone shows that the permissions in the Experience Cloud are easy to manage. The information for installing our app is publicly accessible. While sensitive billing information is, of course, only available to the user to whom the invoices belong.

Other use cases for the Community Cloud

Now we provide some other examples of using Community Clouds from our experience:

The Community Cloud as a knowledge base for customers or partners

Some of our customers can just as well only share certain product information with their existing customers or partners within the Community. For example, documentation, new releases, or updates.

The Community Cloud as a platform for communication between external and internal employees

With a few adjustments, the Salesforce Community Cloud can be used as a platform for communication between external and internal employees. For example, one of our clients significantly reduced administrative effort by shifting communication between internal employees and coaches (external employees) to a Community. Coaches can now view the participant list for their seminars there. They can also manage their appointments. (For example, when is which coach available? Who can step in as a substitute if someone falls ill? Etc.) Additionally, some of the previously laboriously self-created financial documents are directly generated from Salesforce and sent to external employees. For such a Community, we used the following template:

You see: In principle, there are few limits to using Communities.

Below, we have compiled the advantages and disadvantages of the Experience Cloud for you.

Advantages of the Community Cloud

• Quick setup
• Everything directly in your trusted environment
• Easy rights management
• Automatically optimized for all devices (smartphone, tablet, desktop, …)
• In most cases, an own app is quickly created

Disadvantages of the Community Cloud

• Speed (due to the maximum number of transactions)

If many users search for something in your system at the same time, it can lead to longer loading times.

• Cost per user

You need to purchase a license for each user. This can become expensive with many users. However, the prices per user usually decrease significantly. Especially if you already know that you will need many licenses.

• Template limits

The Community initially provides some templates. Here are some examples:

These can then be quite flexibly customized. Additionally, completely new templates can even be created. However, the system is optimized for using these templates. If the use case is stretched too far, you will feel it more and more. For example, a forum is simply not designed to be a video portal (like YouTube).

If you therefore have a completely different use case / want it completely individual, it may be that an implementation using the following alternative is better suited for you.

The Alternative: Heroku Connect

Due to these disadvantages, we give you an alternative: Heroku Connect. With Heroku, you can create a fully customizable (e.g., Java) application and then (if desired) connect it to your Salesforce environment. Additionally, you use Heroku’s powerful servers. This way, you do not encounter any limits, even with thousands of users.

Advantages of Heroku Connect

• Completely customizable

With the support of Heroku Connect, you create your application from scratch: This means both backend and frontend are created specifically for your needs. Heroku essentially provides the super-fast computer that ensures you have enough power. No matter how many users you have on your system.

• Scalable performance

And the performance is always adapted to you. In this post, you can find more information about it or, of course, on the Heroku website itself. Otherwise, the same applies here: If you have any questions, just write to us.

Disadvantages of Heroku Connect

• Cost
• Time

A custom application has many advantages. The imagination has no limits: from a tracking app for a tea start-up to a tax office management system, anything is possible. However, it will almost always be more expensive than a ready-to-use solution and will also take longer to deploy. We are honest about that. Therefore, we come to the following conclusion:

Conclusion: The Experience Cloud is almost always the right solution

In summary: For most use cases, the Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) is the perfect solution to connect various stakeholders. We looked at the Cloudwharf Community as an example. With it, we have an interface between support and customers and a public knowledge base. Additionally, we manage our license business there. The alternative presented to the Community Cloud is fully customizable and has hardly any performance limits: Want to create an app for potentially a few million users? Then Heroku could be the better solution. Usually, however, we recommend choosing the Experience Cloud.

Of course, you need to determine this for each use case individually. Just send us an email if you want to hear our opinion on it or want to implement a project of this kind with us.

If you first want to learn more about Heroku or if our sevdesk for Salesforce application has made you curious, then check out one of these blog posts:

• In this post, we described one of our projects and Heroku’s role in it.
• Here you can find more information about our integration: sevdesk for Salesforce.
• Lastly, if you do not use sevdesk as an accounting tool, Finblick is the solution for you – have a look at our accounting app.

And if there are any more questions or you need further information, just:

.

Sources

[1] What is Salesforce Experience former Community Cloud and how can it help you

[2] Salesforce Community Cloud

Marco Zander

Share: