About to migrate to Salesforce Communities? Here are 10 things that you should plan to do as part of your migration efforts.
- Determine the Scope of Your Migration. See my blog on 3 Things to Consider Before Migrating to Salesforce Communities for more information.
- Plan Your Roll Out Strategy. Depending on the scope of your migration, you may want to heavily market the upcoming changes to build excitement, or you may plan to roll out with less pomp and circumstance if you are doing a migration without any new features.
- Setup your Community. This is all point-and-click configuration and very straightforward. Check out the Getting Started with Communities guide for more information.
- Update Hyperlinks. Salesforce Communities has a different base URL than Salesforce portals (learn more). If all hyperlinks inside your Community were written using URLFOR(), you can skip this step.
- Update Email Templates. Your automated welcome emails, forgot password emails, etc. will need to be updated with new merge fields that are specific to Communities. All other emails containing hyperlinks pointing at the Community will need to be updated to have the correct URL. If you used a custom label or formula field to control the URL merged into your email templates, you will simply need to update those and not the templates themselves.
- Update Header & CSS. Depending on how your portal was styled and if you are rolling out global search, this may or may not not be required.
- Update SSO. Since your URL has changed, you will need to update your SSO settings regardless of whether Salesforce is your Service Provider or Identity Provider.
- Migrate Users to New Profiles. If you decide to change licenses, you will need to create a new profile and migrate users to that profile. Users will have the same username and password, unless you move from a customer to partner license or vice versa.
- Point Users to Your New Login Page. Not only will the URL will be different from the portal login page, but if you used Visualforce to build a custom page, you’ll need to update the code to point users the community instead of the portal.
- Do Full Regression Testing. This is the most time consuming part of migrating, but with a few power users leading the charge, you’ll get through this in no time. Pay special attention to all of your hyperlinks.
How long it will take to do all of this depends on how your portal was originally architected. Perficient offers advisory services to guide you through this process, or we can do the entire migration for you as well, if preferred. Feel free to reach out to sales@perficient.com with questions.
