Salesforce Community Cloud can be used for a variety of applications, including sales communities, customer self-service, marketing campaign management, or anywhere you need portal, content and social combined into one experience.
At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce has been having a lot of sessions related to communities and I’ve seen a lot of communities focused on partners. That is if you are company that has sales partners, dealers, etc. a partner community would be relevant to you. 
The Community Cloud sits on top of the Salesforce1 platform and Site.com, so it takes advantage of all the features of that platform and the mobile version as well. For example, if you need to expose sales leads to a partner, you can use the Salesforce CRM capabilities and display that data on your Partner Community. You can also incorporate Chatter and get instant file sharing, social networking and group features in your application.
Salesforce shared their roadmap for communities today at the Dreamforce Conference. Here are some of the items I captured that are on the roadmap for the Winter 15 release:
- Self Service Templates
- All templates are automatically responsive for mobile devices
- Topics are used to organize content on the site
- Feature topics can be used to highlight special content on the site
- Discussions are available for public users and are separate from Chatter. When you add a new discussion item, the system will try to automatically add topics based on your content.
- Login pages are already templated. You can also use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
- There is a personal news feed that shows all your own posts.
- Profile has been simplified and you can also include gaming in the system
- Community Console
- A community moderator has access to community management features
- Case management can be integrated and a case can be started from any discussion topic. From their service console a case manager can respond through the community to an individual user or to everyone in that community.
- Community Management now has more tools to manage community. They can see analytics about the community – there are about 160 additional reports available to the moderators.
- There are reputation levels and points so you can drive adoption. You can also use these points in other applications through custom APEX objects.
- Community Designer
- The designer is in beta right now and is targeted at a Salesforce Administrator. You can modify some parts of the UI. If you need more than what’s in designer, you can get under the covers too.
- The designer lets you change the branding with a new header image, different fonts and colors.
- Each of the features within the community are going to be Lightning components when Lightning becomes fully available.
- There is a preview feature to show you how your design changes look on different devices.
Future themes for Community Cloud include:
- More templates and allowing administrators to create their own templates
- Increasing the speed of delivering a community and more analytics
- Improving adoption techniques for communities
Community cloud is clearly a highly viable horizontal portal that can be used to satisfy a lot of business needs.
