Communities are branded spaces for your employees, customers, and partners to connect. You can customize and create communities to meet your business needs, then transition seamlessly between them.
Communities are a great way to share information and collaborate with people outside your company who are key to your business processes, such as customers or partners.
You can use Communities to:
Drive more sales by connecting your employees with your distributors, resellers, and suppliers.
Deliver world-class service by giving your customers one place to get answers.
Manage social listening, content, engagement, and workflow all in one place.
You can create multiple communities within your organization for different purposes. For example, you could create a customer support community to reduce support costs, or a channel sales community for partner deal support, or you could have a community specifically dedicated to an upcoming event.
Communities may contain a subset of features and data available in your internal Salesforce organization and can be customized to use your company branding. In addition, you can choose which members from your company and which customers, partners, or other people outside your company can join.
Communities live inside your organization and are easily accessed from a drop-down menu in the top left corner of Salesforce or in the Salesforce1 Mobile Browser App. Use this menu to switch between your communities and your internal Salesforce organization.
Creating Communities
To start creating communities, click Customize | Communities | All Communities, then click New Community.
Enter a community name.
Note:
If you’re creating multiple communities, keep in mind that community names may be truncated in the global header drop-down menu. Users can see up to 32 characters of the name, and the Preview and Offline status indicators count toward that number. Make sure that the visible part of the name is distinctive enough for users to distinguish between multiple communities.
Enter a description.
Enter a unique value at the end of the URL field.
This value is appended to the domain you entered when enabling communities to create a unique URL for this community. For example, if your domain is UniversalTelco.force.com and you’re creating a customer community, you can designate the URL as UniversalTelco.force.com/customers.
Note:
You can create one community in your organization that doesn’t have a custom URL.
You can change your community name and URL after the community is published, but users won’t be redirected to the new URL. If these changes are necessary, be sure to inform your community members before making the change.
Click Create.
The community is created in Preview status.
On the confirmation page, click Edit to customize your community.
Important:
When you create a community, your profile is automatically added to the list of profiles that have access. As a result, all users in your organization with this profile can log in to the community once it’s Published. If you don’t want all users with your profile to have access, you can remove the profile and give yourself access through a different profile or permission set.
Cheers!!!