I recently blogged about the The Top 10 Reasons to migrate to Salesforce Communities from Salesforce Portals. If you think you are ready to take the plunge, here are three things that you need to think about before starting your migration efforts:
- Do you want to add enhancements when migrating? Most of the customers who come to us to migrate are doing so because they want to get onto the new platform and improve their existing portals. For example, in self-service communities, many customers strive to deflect more cases using new tools such as Chatter Answers, or the newer, Chatter Questions. While you can migrate without making any enhancements, migration is an excellent opportunity to enhance upon what you have already built, fix past pain points and give users a real reason to login to your new Community. If you have an extremely complex implementation, you may want to first move to the Communities platform and then enhance your community to mitigate some risk.
- Do you want to change licenses? Changing licenses is not mandatory and does increase the migration effort.
That said, we see many customers moving to the license model where you purchase a pool of Community logins each month that are shared by all users, a model previously available in the Customer Portal, but not Partner Portal. This model takes away all concerns about giving a license to a user who may not login often, although if all of your users login several times a week or more on average, it’s likely not the right model for you. - Do you want to turn Chatter on? Chatter is turned on by default in Communities (if enabled for internal users), but you have the ability to disable it. We see immense value in leveraging Chatter in your Community to further strategic business goals, such as case deflection and partner engagement; however, including Chatter requires planning and ongoing moderation. Be sure to check out my blog, Does Your Salesforce Community Live up to Its Name?, and follow Erica Kuhl, Sr. Director of Salesforce Success Community, for more information on what it takes to build and manage a successful Community. I encourage you to include Chatter as we’ve seen it be very successful for clients of ours (hear from MedAssets at Dreamforce 2014); however, if you still don’t think you are ready or it is not a good fit for your business model, you can easily turn it off.
Once you have these big picture decisions made, you will be ready ready to build a migration timeline and determine the specific tasks that you will need to perform in order to migrate.
