5 Community Cloud Tools to Boost Your Salesforce Community Performance in 2016

Salesforce Spring ’16 has come up with new and enhanced Community Cloud features that aim to provide a thriving community experience to the community users.

These features are packed with an array of enhancements that include:

• A set of templates that are better customizable than previous ones
• An easy display of Salesforce data with custom object pages
• Records creation with the help of global actions
• Easy to manage community pages
• Easy to navigate communities

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Following are some of the exciting features of Community Cloud that you need to utilize in 2016:

Chatter in Community Templates

• Customized groups: Now community members can add groups in the navigation menu, which will automatically display the menu item having the list of groups. Also, users can make a menu item public, which the guest users without a login can also browse.
• Rich user profile components: The two column layout allows community users to find and view everything they want to know about the other users, such as their profile pictures, contact information, Chatter statistics, followers and who they follow. The interface is responsive on a mobile device, it shows the entire information in a single column layout under four tabs: Feed, Details, Cases, and Related.
• Related lists: Community members can now add User Profile Related List component to their user profile page allowing other users to look for their related lists like files, groups, who they follow, and followers at one place, with the help of View All button.
• Text editing and link preview: Community members can now create feed posts and post questions using text formatting features like bold, italic etc. Media files, such as videos and images can be embedded into media posts.

Files in Communities

• Multiple files in a single post: Users can now attach up to five files in a single feed post and view them as thumbnails.
• Unified selection and lightning file preview: Community users can view files in a post attached to them in a unified form. They can also preview these files using the lightning file preview player.
• Live post editing: This comes as a great feature for users who miss something while publishing a post. Let’s say a user forgets to mention or tag another user in a post. To include the missed out name, they don’t have to add a comment to the original post. Instead, they can just edit and update the original post.

Community Templates

• Improved navigation: The navigation menu now supports opportunities, leads, and groups, which makes community navigation even easier. To get the navigation in a particular order, users can drag the items according to their own preferences.
• Topic catalog/topic/subtopic: In order to get more structured community navigation, community users can add subtopics from the UI directly in the community management page. Community members can also view community topics in the topic catalog within a single span.
• Email/Password change: When you go to “My Settings” page, you can edit your email address and password in the community itself. However, the username cannot be changed.

Community Builder

• Markup addition to page: It allows community members to make the community more customizable by adding a markup to the page using thetag.
• Enhanced page manage: Managing pages in Community Builder is easy now; community members can select the active pages, create/delete pages, add variations, and access properties of a page.
• Improved error handling: Salesforce has enhanced the error handling capabilities of community builder. It shows specific error messages for issues like malformed URLs or invalid page and so on.
• Enhanced page loading: With enhanced page loading, community users will now be able to see a ghost version of community page, instead of a blank page, until the community page is completely loaded.

Community Management

• Size limit for files: In order to keep your community data under control, you can set a limit for community files, including the size and type of files that can be uploaded.
• Community moderation: The moderation limits ensure that your community performs optimally. So you can extend keyword criteria list up to 30 in your organization that was previously up to 10.
• Keyword lists: Earlier, the keyword lists supported only letters, ampersands (&), and numbers, but now they also support special characters such as hyphens (-), and spaces.

Do you want to enrich the experience of your community users in 2016?