Brendon Jones, Senior Solutions Architect at Perficient, recently wrote a blog post about the differences between portals and Salesforce Communities:
Communities go beyond portals by adding social collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile access while retaining both enterprise security and tight integration with business processes.
Salesforce provides two general types of communities that can be used for a broad variety of purposes, from customer service to marketing or engagement of resellers, suppliers and partners.
In addition to going into detail about the different types of communites, he also included a video by Brendan Callum, also a Senior Solutions Architect at Perficient, where he discusses Salesforce Communities and how they can be used in your business. You can read the full post here.
