As we wave a final farewell to Koa and Kokua, we turn our eyes toward bigger and better features in the Winter ’19 release. As per the usual, I’m nerd-level excited over these improvements – just ask anyone who begins to talk Salesforce Communities with me!
Winter ’19 is heavily focused on the user experience through gamification, enhanced accessibility, providing the right content to the right audience at the right time, among some other notable changes. Read through the highlights below!
General Communities
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Meant to be a public knowledge base, users can jump right into finding articles or topics & case creation without having to authenticate. Get them answers fast! This goes hand in hand with the new global action for case creation, specifically for unauthenticated users, too.
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I heard rumblings about this feature a year ago and am PUMPED it’s moving along, albeit in Beta right now. This will allow your internal team to create content right in Workspaces, or pull it in from Salesforce. All your content in one place. Refreshing!
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Oh yes, I audibly gasped about this one. You can now choose to create audience criteria and define if the criteria is AND or OR (ex., profile = Community User OR Location = China). On top of that ground-breaker, they added the ability to define criteria with equals, does not equal, contains, or does not contain (ex., User > Contact > Account > Status “does not equal” Inactive)
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Theme Improvements
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In addition to the ability to export your whole template or just a single page from community to community (or package for distribution on the AppExchange), you can now export just the theme.
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- More Capabilities
- New Themes to choose from for focusing the content to your requirements.
- Pin the navigation to the header for greater visibility or push the hero image under your navigation are now options for you to further customize.
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- Edit page URLs
- This one’s huge: all pages (except Home, Login & Error) can be changed to follow the same format your customers or partners are use to. Before you’d need to do a combination of URL redirects or leveraging Visualforce pages to get the right URL you wanted (for SEO purposes or migration requirements) – now it’s easy peasy.
Lightning Components in Communities
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You can now allow your community users to filter search results by more than just the object searched. By configuring the fields you want to filter by on the Search Layout, users can refine their results to find what they want, faster.
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Similar to how most forums work, the Feed now supports threaded (or nested) discussions. This one has been a big pain point for many of the projects I’ve worked on and am glad to see it being addressed.
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This will be super handy in gathering information from a user during the registration process, especially contact preferences, privacy policy acceptance, etc.
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As an admin, you can enable topics specifically to be added by users to records, separate from topics associated to discussions or articles, all configured in the Content Management section in Workspaces
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You can now decide to show specific record related lists on the detail page, and can choose between a wide or narrow design, depending on your page layout.
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Snap-Ins Chat now offer Pre-Chat and Routing buttons
Community Engagement
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Recognition Badges allow admins or other users to give shout outs in other members’ feeds, amplifying the gamification aspect of communities. I had a project while this was in Beta and loved the results! You share in the feed or as an action on the user’s profile page, and you can see what badges you were given on your User Profile.
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This works across all objects, and includes the answers themselves, and which has been marked as the best answer. Very strong addition to the reporting fleet here!
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Files in Communities
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You can edit the file name, description and any custom fields around a file you have access to edit INSIDE the community now. In addition, when uploading files in a community, you can now populate custom fields – VERY handy for managing large amounts of files in your community.
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Partner Central
One of the biggest changes to come out of this is that the requirement to create a username that is unique in that org, can now be relegated to ONE org. This is an irreversible option, so be sure it’s truly one you want to make.
Sharing & Security
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Sharing sets available for all customer & partner licenses, making upgrading much simpler with existing sharing sets in place. In addition, in Beta, is the ability to create sharing sets for Opportunities, Campaigns, Orders, and Contacts with multiple Accounts.
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Offering different levels of security to your community and allowing admins to only accept content from whitelisted external hosts.
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Members can login now with their phone number, email, etc., and even use a verification code to log in instead of their password, all done through Login Discovery pages in Workspaces. In addition, you can also have visitors join by using their email of phone instead of requiring a username.
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Internal users can now access communities through an External authentication provider that supports the OpenID Connect Protocol. This comes in addition to setting different login policies for these users as well, such as relaxing IP constraints.
Other Noteworthy Updates
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Introduction of Lightning External Apps (Plus) licenses to support users from a wide range of requirements, allowing access to platform-focused capabilities, custom objects, and even CRM objects.
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Members can now change the owner on the list view level, selecting up to 200 records and selecting Change Owner from the action menu.
Phew! That was a lot, I know, but doesn’t it get you excited? Don’t forget to test out the new features in a preview org, and test in a sandbox when it’s released there. Other than that, happy trails!