Top 5 Exciting Salesforce Communities Summer ’18 Enhancements

Can you smell it? Fresh cut grass, birds chirping, the splash of kids cannonballing into the pool – IT’S SUMMER! Or at least late spring. And with the weather we’ve been having, it may not feel like it, but at the risk of sounding cliche, things are heating up in the Salesforce Summer ’18 release, especially in Communities! Here are some highlights to look out for this release.

Gamification & Chatter

I put this section first for a reason. And that reason is BADGING. Gamification has been a missing piece of the puzzle within Salesforce Communities and they are coming through big on this one (starting it out in Beta, of course). Users can create their own badges, or select from admin-specified badges to give to other community members to recognize their actions (best answer, thanks for the help, etc.). You can even get fancy with Process Builder and set up flows to automatically award badges who reach certain levels or milestones.

Here are some other enhancements of note:

  • Can use community activity as criteria on Email Journeys in Marketing Cloud
  • Admins can close a conversation, stopping unrelated or irrelevant conversation to continue on a post.
  • Pinning posts is now GA, with enhanced ability to pin up to three posts in a feed.
  • Streams visibility and actions now accessible from within Salesforce org.
  • Can disable visibility of topics assigned to articles on detail page.
  • Can now enable notifications on upvotes to your posts and comments.

Components Get Beefed

Components got in shape for their summer bods! It’s really awesome to see Salesforce investing in Flows – such a great user experience to guide them toward action. Speaking of action, Recommended Actions, part of the Einstein Next Best Action pilot, can display the next best action to your user. Whether that be a special promotion, a product to consider, or action to take, all will be based on the actions the user has previously taken to give the user a unique experience.

Here’s some more beefiness:

SEO, Security & Notifications Enhancements

For some these are the boring parts you skip over, secure in the knowledge they work. But really, these are BIG enhancements. Building upon the meta tag availability per page, public Salesforce objects and fields can now be indexed by search engines for increased visibility, including content pulled in via CMS Connect. Increased user experience around logging in, too: Users can now log in with verification codes instead of passwords.

Here’s some other Interesting enhancements:

Partner Community Gets even Better

Partner communities hold a special place in my heart, so it’s always special to see handy additions and enhancements come out around them. Building upon previous releases’ MDF enhancements, there’s more to love there: associate campaigns with budgets, extend fund date availability, restrict field editablity from users, and workflow rules to update statuses.

Other note-worthy Partner Community enhancements:

LEX-y Libraries

That’s right, Salesforce is making libraries sexy by bringing them into the Lightning Experience! You can access Libraries by going to Files in the Lightning Experience, then selecting Libraries. Admins can now manage library membership (People or Groups) in LEX as well as view a cleaner file detail page. My personal favorite is the ability to add a custom library image, visible in the org and in communities!

Manage members to your library in the Lightning Experience

Edit the image thumbnail of your library!

 

Friendly Warning

In addition to the great enhancements, there’s also been a round of renaming and adjustments to the markup of certain components that you’ll need to test for when the sandbox updates roll out. More details below:

There’s OHSOMUCH more in the full release notes here in regards to the other Salesforce clouds, but I hope this gives you a nice 15,000 foot view of the Communities releases pending. Don’t forget to update your communities when the sandbox update is released and do regression testing!

Originally posted on Perficient’s Salesforce blog.

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