It’s that time of year again, pumpkin spice starts to invade your food and drinks and Salesforce begins their Winter release process. Even though it’s still early and many new features are in preview or beta, I’m really excited about seeing these live in Lightning Communities!
There’s quite a bit of new features coming to Communities this release, so here’s an overview of my top 5 areas:
Partner Relationship Management
Channel programs & Levels, MDF, Guided Setup
Salesforce is really putting a strong effort into partner-focused communities, which is great to see. The Winter ’18 release is bringing a few really cool new features, including the ability to group partners into channel programs and create levels within each program, providing motivation for your partners, and providing you with the ability to control access to resources through sharing groups. You can now also provide further incentives to your partners through Market Development Funds. Channel Account Managers can set up budgets, allocate funds, manage fund requests and process claims on top of all the great reporting options.
If you’re setting up a partner community for the first time, you may not be familiar with the objects and processes required. Salesforce has brilliantly included the Guided Setup in the Community Workspaces that walks you through, from start to finish, setting up Lead Registration, Lead Distribution, and the new feature, MDF, making it foolproof!
File & Library Enhancements
External Files in Communities, Libraries in Communities, Partner-created content deliveries, File privacy
While seemingly mundane (libraries sometimes are, amirite?) the enhancements of file and resource handling this release are really great for partners and customers. To harken back to the iPhone slogan of 2009, “there’s an app for that”, these new file features have me saying “there’s a component for that”! Have files in Quip, Google, SharePoint, Box, or OneDrive? There’s a component for that. Want to show your Salesforce Content libraries in your community? There’s a component for that. Want to preview files from your libraries? There’s a component for that. Want to use the Lightning file upload feature in your design? Guess what…there’s a component for that!
In addition to all the abilities to render resources in your community, there are new features that help you and your users control access to those assets. Files uploaded in the community can now have their visibility controlled by the file owner, and partners can create content deliveries or public links to send to their leads or customers.
Originally posted on Perficient’s Salesforce blog, I encourage you to read the rest of the article by clicking here.