Can you smell it? Fresh cut grass, birds chirping, the splash of kids cannonballing into the pool – IT’S SUMMER! Or at least late spring. And with the weather we’ve been having, it may not feel like it, but at the risk of sounding cliche, things are heating up in the Salesforce Summer ’18 release, especially in Communities! Here are some highlights to look out for this release:
Gamification & Chatter
I put this section first for a reason. And that reason is BADGING. Gamification has been a missing piece of the puzzle within Salesforce Communities and they are coming through big on this one (starting it out in Beta, of course). Users can create their own badges, or select from admin-specified badges to give to other community members to recognize their actions (best answer, thanks for the help, etc.). You can even get fancy with Process Builder and set up flows to automatically award badges who reach certain levels or milestones.
Here are some other enhancements of note:
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Can use community activity as criteria on Email Journeys in Marketing Cloud
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Admins can close a conversation, stopping unrelated or irrelevant conversation to continue on a post.
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Pinning posts is now GA, with enhanced ability to pin up to three posts in a feed.
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Can disable visibility of topics assigned to articles on detail page.
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Can now enable notifications on upvotes to your posts and comments.
Components Get Beefed
Components got in shape for their summer bods! It’s really awesome to see Salesforce investing in Flows – such a great user experience to guide them toward action. Speaking of action, Recommended Actions, part of the Einstein Next Best Action pilot, can display the next best action to your user. Whether that be a special promotion, a product to consider, or action to take, all will be based on the actions the user has previously taken to give the user a unique experience.
Here’s some more beefiness:
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Paused Flows available. Admins choose pause points in a flow and community members can view their paused flows and resume them.
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Progressive Rendering allows you to now choose the order in which the components load on the page (see image below).
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Standalone contact support button no longer anchored to the Ask a Question Button. ‘Nuff said.
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Subject field added to case deflection report so you can track missing content address pre-emptively through articles, topics, highlighted areas, etc.
- Snap-ins Appointment Management available in the community now
- Snap-ins Chat now allows setting routing order, displaying their place in line, and external scripts and styles for custom chat events.
Progressive Rendering on a Lightning Component in Salesforce Communities
SEO, Security & Notifications Enhancements
For some these are the boring parts you skip over, secure in the knowledge they work. But really, these are BIG enhancements. Building upon the meta tag availability per page, public Salesforce objects and fields can now be indexed by search engines for increased visibility, including content pulled in via CMS Connect. Increased user experience around logging in, too: Users can now log in with verification codes instead of passwords.
Here’s some other Interesting enhancements:
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Expiration of links to the community in emails can be adjusted to 1, 7, or 180 days
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Password reset links in emails will NOT expire until the user has successfully confirmed the password reset.
- Restrict users’ access to cases on which they are listed as a contact (Beta)
- Lockout email templates can now be customized to match branding template
Customize the expiration of your community links in emails.
Partner Community Gets even Better
We here at Perficient live and breathe partner communities, so it’s always special to see handy additions and enhancements come out around them. Building upon previous releases’ MDF enhancements, there’s more to love there: associate campaigns with budgets, extend fund date availability, restrict field editablity from users, and workflow rules to update statuses.
Other note-worthy Partner Community enhancements:
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Sharing sets now available for Customer Community Plus and Partner licenses (Beta). This makes up for when Customer Community users upgraded to CC+, they lost sharing via sharing sets.
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In the Partner Community template, delegated admins can now activate and deactivate members and reset passwords
LEX-y Libraries
That’s right, Salesforce is making libraries sexy by bringing them into the Lightning Experience! You can access Libraries by going to Files in the Lightning Experience, then selecting Libraries. Admins can now manage library membership (People or Groups) in LEX as well as view a cleaner file detail page. My personal favorite is the ability to add a custom library image, visible in the org and in communities!
Manage members to your library in the Lightning Experience
Edit the image thumbnail of your library!
Friendly Warning
In addition to the great enhancements, there’s also been a round of renaming and adjustments to the markup of certain components that you’ll need to test for when the sandbox updates roll out. More details below:
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Lightning Bolt now called Lightning Bolt Solutions
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Language Picker component now called Language Selector, and now can have a customized label!)
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Edit Self Service User permission = Manage Customer Users, and no longer enabled by default for new standard profiles
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h1 tag has been changed to h3 on topic detail and search result article titles
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<ui:button> is now <lightning:button> on Case Deflection, Global Search for Peer-To-Peer Communities, Search & Post Publisher, Topic Articles by Topic, and Related Record List components.
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<head> markup: make sure you dont see any errors in your builder, and will need to make adjustments if you do.
There’s OHSOMUCH more in the full release notes here in regards to the other Salesforce clouds, but I hope this gives you a nice 15,000 foot view of the Communities releases pending. Don’t forget to update your communities when the sandbox update is released and do regression testing!
