Kara Allen

On my way to New York for a launch event for a 6,800 person employee community that we just rolled out, I opened up the release notes for the Summer ’17 release to check out what’s coming for Communities in the next release. I was looking for a specific feature that Salesforce product management had […]

The Salesforce Summer ’17 release has a lot of features for Community Cloud that are centered around having a more targeted, intelligent experience for your community members. As part of this, Salesforce is tracking more interactions than ever and giving you (and Einstein) access to that data to take action on it. Here are a […]

A Functional Perspective on Community Design Architecting reusable lightning components for a Lightning Community is very different from architecting a Visualforce page. A key value proposition of Lightning components is that they are reusable and can easily be added into Lightning Communities by system administrators. In order to realize that value, it is critical to architect […]

Yesterday Salesforce announced the launch of Lightning Partner Communities, delivering a best-in-class digital experience for companies looking to accelerate channel sales from their partner ecosystem. Empowering your partners, resellers, and channel teams with new collaborative tools has become imperative to driving growth for successful partner programs today. However, many companies still struggle with disconnected business systems, […]

Sam Jacobs, partner engagement manager, from our customer OpenX spoke about the self-service community that we helped them to roll out last October. They programmatically connect sellers of ad space and buyers of ad space in real-time. They are selective about who they let into their marketplace, they are ranked #1 in traffic quality, outranking […]

I’m going to make a bold statement: Force.com Communities are a soon to be a thing of the past. With Winter ’17 bringing the final missing features to the Community Builder templates, it’s time to rethink the reasons why you said no to the Community Builder a few months back, and revisit templates. We’ve built […]

It is clear that the Community Cloud product team has been busy the past few releases and the Summer ’16 release is no different. If we had to say that there was a clear winner in this release from a Community Cloud perspective, it would be community managers. Summer ’16 includes a number of robust […]

As a Salesforce consultant, I rarely expect my French major to come in handy. Today, I put it to good use as I went to test out translation features in the Community Builder, known in French apparently as the “Générateur de communauté”, from inside the Winter ’16 Napili template. Here is what I learned: You […]

While you can create a Salesforce Community using the Community Builder directly in your production environment, I would not recommend it in the majority of cases. Fortunately, it is quite easy to deploy your templates into production by following these three simple steps: Step 1: Use Change Sets Use change sets to move all custom lightning […]

If you have not yet had a chance to read the Spring ’16 release notes that came out yesterday, go read them now and skip right down to the Communities section because the Spring ’16 features are truly game-changing for Salesforce Community Cloud. After reading through the release notes yesterday, I emailed one of our […]

I am marrying a man who happens to dislike the Salesforce1 mobile app. Over the past few days, it has been a big subject of debate as he tried to figure out ways to work around using it on his iPad mini, such as using Opera as his mobile browser which does not support Salesforce1. Being […]

Since the Salesforce Winter ’16 release notes came out in late August, we have seen customers eager to use the now extensible Napili template in the Salesforce Community Builder. Why? It offers companies a way to quickly setup an attractive, engagement-centric self-service community that is built on the modern Lightning framework and it is fully […]