Now Powered By Lightning UX Framework, Salesforce Community Cloud Upgrades Its Digital Experience

Salesforce is enhancing its Community Cloud to empower partners to design more vibrant, highly customized portals for organizations looking to better engage customers, employees and their own partners.

In its two most-recent releases, and one coming later this year, the CRM leader is "extending the digital experience," making design and branding a core component of the platform used for deploying self-service online communities, Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Community Cloud, told CRN.

Salesforce is focused on giving systems integrators the ability to use pre-built templates, components, and themes to address needs of customers in specific verticals looking to engage diverse audiences, Rosenman said.

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Salesforce introduced Community Builder in 2015, a product taking a templatized approach to launching community portals. Last year, Lightning Bolt (pictured) provided a framework for building portals and community clouds faster with reusable components.

Those capabilities undergird this year's series of Community Cloud upgrades.

The Summer release of Community Cloud added CMS Connect, a tool for integration with most popular content management systems, Rosenman said.

"Now they can leverage existing investment in a CMS system and create personalized experiences for whoever is viewing this content," she told CRN.

Before that, Salesforce introduced the ability to target specific audiences with unique content. The next release in the winter will go further by enabling dynamic creation of custom themes that display branding geared to customers or partners accessing the Community Cloud portals, all guided by CRM data, Rosenman said.

Those upgrades, for example, could allow a vendor to deploy a channel portal with content and a user experience that discerns between partners in different tiers or geographies, she said.

Partners told CRN the user experience-oriented upgrades are timely as Salesforce integrators increasingly adopt Lightning Bolt as their approach to building reusable templates and components specific to the industries they specialize in serving.

Eric Scheel, CTO of Magnet360, a Minneapolis, Minn.-based partner, said introducing the Lightning platform to Community Cloud prompted a major transformation continuing to take shape with the latest releases.

"Features like audience targeting, those are features that allow us to continue down to that one-to-one journey level, create a much more tailored experience," Scheel told CRN.

But the real transformation underlying all those upgrades is the Lightning UX framework supplanting VisualForce, another user-experience framework, as the preferred means of constructing Communities through Salesforce.

Salesforce in its latest releases has been peeling back restrictions on how much customization is possible with Lightning, he said.

"We're only building Lightning Communities going forward, not building traditional VisualForce communities," Scheel said. "Don't have to anymore. Can do this all through Lightning."

Yoni Barkan, director of global solutions and innovation at Appirio, a partner headquartered in Indianapolis, said "packaging user experience and design components with the underlying workflow and business logic and objects" is an entirely new approach to deploying online communities with Salesforce.

"Lightning Bolt gives us the capability to package this up and quickly deploy it to customers," Barkan told CRN.

The audience targeting and dynamic theming upgrades will further enable partners to offer Community Cloud variations customized for specific users, including brand experiences that adapt to different audiences.

"Generally speaking we are getting a lot of traction and interest in Salesforce Communities and Lightning Bolt solutions right now, especially when we leverage the newer design capabilities," Barkan said.

Enterprises don't want entirely off-the-shelf solutions from their SIs, he said. Community Cloud increasingly allows partners to showcase their industry expertise and leverage pre-built components as accelerators, he said.