1. Breaking the single concept of UAT into smaller UAT components
2. Starting UAT early when the smaller components are available for testing
3. Assigning a UAT Project Manager to handle UAT processes and communications
4. Schedule a final UAT once the smaller UAT items are complete

• Functional
• Visual
• Browser/Compatibility
• Accessibility
• SEO
• Analytics
• Load/Performance
• Security

1. Content migration happens after QA and before UAT.  The content migration team provides another level of testing after QA and before UAT.  We take advantage of the content migration process to identify defects/issues reported by the content migration team (typically visual and functional) before UAT.
2. Once the content migration team has completed certain areas of the site, business stakeholders can validate the functionality and content.  Business stakeholders can work with the development and content migration team to address issues early and make the appropriate corrections.

• Work with the development and QA teams on delivery/timing of features or bug fixe
• Work with the content migration team on delivery/timing for UAT
• Work with business stakeholders to define UAT testers
• Work with UAT testers to define test cases with criticality and frequency
• Work with business stakeholders and development teams to identify high risk areas (e.g., integrations).  High risk test cases need to be tested early and often to reduce the possibility of major development changes identified during final UAT testing
• Develop a UAT timeline based on resources, availability, test case execution, and expected defect remediation

• Rushing an assessment to devise the easiest solution
• Developing under duress
• Increasing chances of introducing new defects

This is a question that I am often asked and having seen many successful Optimizely portals, I can absolutely say the answer is yes.  I’ve been amazed by what clients have been able to achieve with portals built on the platform.  In this article, I would like to discuss a few topics that could potentially help you make the decision for yourself because context is definitely key.

#1 Features

Portals serve many different purposes these days.  A few examples of functions a portal may serve for your company:

• Employee Directory
• Document Repository
• Corporate Communications
• Workspaces
• Blogging
• Application Launchpad
• Information Aggregator (News/Resources)
• Search (For many of these features)

A quick look at these features shows that some of these elements lend themselves towards back office or document collaboration.  If this is the main function of your portal, you are most likely looking for something along the lines of SharePoint or similar systems in which direct integration with document management or shared drafting is key.  It is very hard to beat SharePoint in a situation like this.  It holds unique advantage in that these are all core office capabilities.  Particularly if customizing the design of the site is irrelevant.

However, the other features on this list are not unlike others you would find on a public website and very much play to the strengths of a platform such as Optimizely.  Rich authoring experience, personalization, experimentation, analytics capabilities, and search all give a nod to Optimizely, which ranks as one of the top DXP platforms.  If communications are the goal of your portal, the more these features shine.  If you want your portal to resemble a public website and have ultimate flexibility over page layout, composition, integrations, and such – you should absolutely be looking at Optimizely.  These features break the mold of the “site in a box” model and lend themselves tightly to corporate brand & identity.  Portals with more of these features open themselves to the broader set of the Optimizely product suite, where it can take your portal to the next level.

#2 Ecosystem

Before deciding portal platform, it’s important to assess your broader site portfolio.

• Are your publicly available websites all on a common platform?
• Is that platform different from your portal platform?
• Would you like to utilize features, content, or templates from these sites in your portal?
• Are you currently evaluating a new platform for all websites due to limitations with your portal or public website platforms?

If you can answer yes to most or all of these questions, you should be looking at Optimizely as a potential platform.  Optimizely’s multisite feature allows content for all of these sites to reside under the same roof.  Even if permissions dictate that it has different owners, the ability is there to benefit from existing content, templates, and blocks for reuse in other sites.  The more sites you build on the platform, the lesser the burden of new components and page development on your development team for each subsequent team.  You can take advantage of development practices across properties, streamlining development & rapid deployment.  Likewise, the more you can benefit from experiments and personalization rules created for subsequent sites to be repurposed.  Thinking about your websites as one cohesive ecosystem allows you to get more out of the platform at a lower average effort per site with a higher rate of reuse.

#3 Vision

Do you feel confident that the platform you are on today can meet your goals for tomorrow?  The decision to move to a new platform for your portal could be a first step in a bigger direction for your overall digital strategy.

• Maybe you want to use some light personalization to serve up relevant content to your internal employees. Why not take advantage of this on your public sites as well?
• What about dashboards set up to reach from integrated applications such as Salesforce, Dynamics, or SAP? Optimizely has connectors that your public websites can use to directly fill leads & data to these systems.
• Do you have data residing in many different silos that you want to generate reports from? Optimizely’s Data Platform (ODP) can be used to coordinate & aggregate disparate data from multiple sources.  Tapping into this can serve as a great basis for custom dashboards & reports within your portal.
• Do users struggle to find relevant information in your portal? Content Recommendations can utilize AI learning to deliver users relevant pages with low effort.

If you feel you are just getting by with your current platform instead of getting ahead, you may want to consider your portal as a launchpad for larger initiatives.  The same can be said if you are already utilizing Optimizely on one or many of your other sites.  This is a great opportunity to get more for your investment and look into bringing your portal onto Optimizely as well.

These are just 3 topics to think about when determining the right platform for your Intranet, but there are many more.  If you have questions or would like to discuss with us in further detail, I would love the opportunity to follow up on your particular portal needs.

Liferay DXP was created with all stakeholders and touchpoints in mind, creating a scalable platform to ensure brand consistency that is easily customizable for developers, marketers, and designers alike. On June 4, 2019, Liferay launched Liferay DXP 7.2 and Liferay Commerce 2.0. The two systems now integrate with one another, thus optimizing the customer experience and creating a seamless journey from start to finish.
So, when it comes to DXP 7.2, what’s new?

Personalized Experiences

Each of your customers is unique, with unique interests and unique needs. A one-size-fits-all approach to experience management isn’t going to cut it. Liferay created DXP 7.2 because they know personalization should be a core feature rather than a separate, add-on application to optimize the customer experience; to achieve this, audience targeting has been moved into the DXP core platform.
With this feature, marketers can now create personalized page experiences for the customer, including adding fragments, navigation updates, and widgets all customized to the appropriate audience, without having to hire developers. What’s more, the advanced segmentation management also integrates with Liferay Analytics Cloud.

Go Headless

Liferay DXP 7.2 gives developers freedom to go headless and create a cleaner omnichannel experience for customers and add content with ease and without limitations. DXP 7.2 can easily power native mobile applications with content and services, websites hosted entirely outside of Liferay DXP and IoT devices.

Streamline Business Operations

Not only will employees benefit from the new platform – your customers’ expectations are more easily met with better workflows, forms, and APIs that reduce bottlenecks and allow for more flexibility to create scalable business applications.
Taking your business to the next level is a terrifying and exhilarating concept that can be made easier by upgrading to Liferay DXP 7.2. As the customer continues to grow and evolve in their digital experience, so must platforms scale with them. To learn more, watch the webinar, Introducing Liferay DXP 7.2: Drive Personalization at Scale.

For a tool to be useful, it must be wielded by someone who knows how to properly use it. Portals are robust tools that can help businesses deliver personalized experiences by surfacing the right content at the right time. But just like any other tool, portals require an investment in understanding before they can be fully utilized.
Recently the Liferay team sat down with Perficient Digital‘s Senior Portal Solutions Architect, David Pierovich, to discuss what enterprises need to know about the power of portals and open source development. During their conversation, many questions were answered including:

• How have portals gained more relevance in the past five years?
• What are some common misconceptions you’ve encountered regarding portal technology?
• How does an organization benefit from using open source technology?
• and many more!

Check out the full post on Liferay’s blog for all the details, including some of David’s first-hand accounts and experiences on how portals can be used.
 
 

A common intranet requirement is the ability to personalize the user’s experience by targeting relevant content to them. This is an area where out of the box SharePoint functionality is limited. That process is now much easier with the release of Rise 2.5, which allows you to manage how content is tagged with core metadata and target content to users based on matching their user profile properties and personal preferences.

In order to create a truly personalized experience we require two things: content and a user profile tagged with relevant metadata.

Core Metadata

The process begins by determining the Core Metadata fields for your organization. These Core Metadata fields are those that matter most to your organization and will apply to both content and the user profile. Determination of Core Metadata fields often begins with an examination of the User Profile and Information Architecture of your portal.

Determining the available data in the user profile and how content owners wish to segment audiences. We find that most organizations will identify between 2 and 5 metadata fields that they consider “Core”. For our example, we will target content based on Department, Location, and Job Title.

Content Tagging

Tagging of content is critical to the ability to target for individual users. Once the Core Metadata fields are determined and configured, Rise provisions these fields to all relevant content types such as News, Pages, Calendar Items, Documents, and more. Content tagging provides context to the content and determines the relevancy of content for individual users.

Figure 1: Core Metadata fields on a Calendar Item

User Properties and Preferences

For optimal results, it is important to have clean data in the User Profile. Organizations often need to perform data cleanup in Active Directory before populating data to the User Profile. For example, it is common to see multiple variations of Department names in the User Profile such as Information Technologies or IT. These types of inconsistencies will make it more difficult to target content effectively. There are often circumstances where a user may want to expand the content targeted to them beyond the values in their User Profile. We can accomplish this by introducing User Preferences. Rise enables the ability to store User Preferences enabling content targeting based on User Profile and User Preferences. For example, as a user in the Human Resources I may also be interested in seeing content from Corporate Communications and Finance, two departments that I work closely with. Based on my User Profile I will have Human Resources content targeted to me, I can then expand the targeting scope by setting a User Preference for Corporate Communication and Finance. The Rise My Profile view allows users to easily manage their User Preferences and maintain some aspects of their User Profile

.

Figure 2: My Profile screen showing User Profile and Preferences

Using Content Targeting

Now that we have content tagged with Core Metadata, reliable User Profile data, and User Preferences we can begin targeting content to users. Rise 2.5 supports two types of content targeting Ranking and Filtering. Ranking leverages SharePoint Search to give more weight or priority to items that match the user’s Profile or Preferences. Items that match more closely will appear at the top of the results increasing their visibility.

To use the Ranking method in Rise set the Sort By: to the User Relevance sorting method. The “Search result priority:” can then be set for each Core Metadata value. The “Search result priority:” is a value from 0 to 10, the higher the value the greater weight the Core Metadata value adds to the content prioritization while a value of 0 means that the value will not be considered. In addition, the content editor may choose to “Prefer User Profile over User Preferences”. When this checkbox is set, User Profile property values carry more weight than User Preferences.

Figure 3: Configure Ranking for Rise Web Part

Filtering works with both Search and List based queries to filter out values that do not match the User Profile or Preferences. The filtering options are highly flexible allowing the content editor to specify placeholders for User value (User Profile), User preferences, and Page value (the current page metadata). In addition specific values can be selected as well. In the example below, content tagged with “All Locations” will be returned as well as items matching the User Profile and Preferences. This is a great way to provide location specific content for a user.

Figure 4: Configure Filtering for Rise Web Parts

The Ranking and Filtering methods can be used together or separately to enable very advanced content targeting abilities. Content targeting is available for all Rise web parts that utilize Search or List data opening up a wide array of capabilities for targeted user content. The below example shows the result of content targeting for two different users. In the examples below the first example shows a member of the Human Resources department, the second example shows a member of the Marketing department. The Recent News web part shows content targeted to the individual users based on their User Profile values.

Figure 5: End user content targeting example for Human Resources user.

Figure 6: End user content targeting example for Marketing user.

Testing Content Targeting

As you can see Rise 2.5 enables a multitude of advanced content targeting capabilities. It is important for content authors to have the ability to test that content is being targeted appropriately. It would be very difficult to force content authors to update their personal User Profile properties in order to test content targeting, and in some organizations, this may not be possible due to restrictive policies. Rise 2.5 includes a Personalization Testing page that allows authorized individuals to override their User Profile and Preference values without modifying the underlying values. This enables content authors to simulate browsing content as another user matching their criteria. The example below demonstrates the ability to override the User Profile and Preferences value. Overrides are persistent during the user’s session or until the overrides are reset.

Figure 7: Personalization testing page for Rise 2.5

Rise 2.5 now offers a complete solution for content targeting and personalization. Get in touch with us to schedule a demo of the content targeting features and other enterprise portal features available with Rise.

Today’s intranet portals serve many purposes, from corporate communications to collaboration and business productivity. But more and more organizations are beginning to look for ways to modernize their intranet platforms and provide a richer, more collaborative end user experience.

Here are three ways that organizations today are modernizing intranet platforms:

• Knowledge Management – rapid advances in technologies, including the internet, have resulted in a virtual waterfall of data and information being shared across organizations. Leveraging your intranet platform as a central foundation for housing and sharing this information enables a more collaborative experience for end users. Your intranet platform can be used to share information vital and important to all employees. It can also be used to facilitate knowledge sharing across departments. You may already be using your intranet to share corporate-driven messages or information such as healthcare benefits or employee handbooks. But think about enabling employees from other areas such as IT or marketing to share relevant and timely information too. IT could use the intranet to create a wiki page explaining how employees can navigate an upcoming system upgrade. Or perhaps marketing publishes a blog post about an upcoming advertising campaign, so employees can share with customers or partners. Today’s intranet portals make it easier for end users to publish their own content. They also improve the ability to effectively curate and search content, making that information easier to find. These features are driving more organizations to enable knowledge management as a core intranet feature.
• Team Collaboration –  yet another area of tremendous growth throughout organizations today is workplace collaboration. Effective collaboration tools enable your employees to easily communicate across departments, office locations or even remotely. A study by Stanford several years ago showed that collaboration can have a positive impact on employee performance. With modern intranet features such as message boards, discussion forums, live chats and status updates, your intranet portal can be the gateway to dynamic employee interactions. They can help connect employees across departments or even across continents. Intranet portals can also serve as a virtual project management tool. Project or department-specific sites enable key stakeholders to work together collaboratively on projects, regardless of their location. This improves business productivity by negating the need for face-to-face interactions or calls to keep projects moving. Today’s intranet portal should serve to connect your mobile, and often global, workforce. It should be as nimble as your organization. This is why forward-thinking companies are leveraging their intranet portal to better equip employees to connect from anywhere, anytime.
• Portal for Company Tools – by deploying some of the features above, your intranet portal will serve as a virtual hub for employee communications and collaboration. A place where employees can search and locate the information they’re looking for. Or share expertise and knowledge with colleagues across the organization. By providing a reliable and enhanced experience, employees will rely on the intranet as vital to their day-to-day work. This is why leading organizations today are also leveraging their intranet as a gateway to business-critical tools, applications and processes. Bringing these tools together through your intranet enables end users to connect to their entire digital workplace from a single point.

While these are some of the top ways that organizations are evolving their intranet, they are not the only ways. Increasingly, more and more organizations are seeking to leverage advanced features to ensure their intranet delivers more value. To learn more about portal trends and best practices, download our recently published guide, “Trends in Intranet Modernization” by clicking here or by filling out the form below.

In today’s diverse working environment, organizations face a challenge of providing systems that cater to a diverse audience. We’ve previously discussed this trend in our series of blog posts, “Anatomy of a Modern Intranet”. By 2020, there will be five generations active in the workplace. All with different work styles and comfort with technology solutions. It is vitally important to understand these differing audiences in order to engage users and drive adoption. Understanding our audience allows us to cater to their individuality and create an inclusive user experience. We thought it would be fun to examine some personality types that you will encounter on your journey to a modern intranet or digital workplace.

Here are four personality types for the modern intranet:

The individuals depicted here are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons within your organization is purely intentional.

1. Newspaper and Coffee Browser
There is something about sipping a cup of coffee and flipping through the newspaper that can be incredibly relaxing. Likewise, many of your users will feel similarly about your intranet. They will take the opportunity to read the latest news and information over their morning cup of “joe”. For this group, the focus is on building a portal that provides a positive user experience.

For these users, it is important to have a continuous stream of fresh and interesting content to peruse. Make content engaging with the inclusion of photos and video media. This will create a compelling experience that will bring these users back for more.

2. Catch me if you can
There will be subsets of your user population that will resist every effort to lure them to the intranet, perhaps missing vital information in the process. For these users, it may be necessary to leverage a multi-channel communication approach. Engage this user base through email newsletters, push notifications, and even offline methods such as posters and elevator message boards.

To convert these users it is important that your additional communication channels validate the intranet as a source of reliable information. Over time, these users will become accustomed to seeking information directly from the source.

3. Social Butterfly
The social butterfly values the ability to participate in a conversation as an active participant over a one-sided content delivery system. These users provide comments and feedback and often share your message with others in their circles.

Engage these users by enabling them to leave comments and feedback, as well as inviting them to rate and share content. Every organization has social butterflies, if your technology is not enabling this set of users, you are likely missing valuable organizational insights.

4. Just the facts
These users have many demands on their time and attention. Rather than browsing and discovering new content, they wish to find answers to their specific questions. These users are more likely to use search over navigation to find the content they seek. They appreciate content that is organized logically and the power of a good summary. They will spend less time on the site, therefore the time they do spend should be productive.

To appeal to these users, you’ll want to spend time honing your site’s navigation and search experiences. The site navigation should be logical and easily understood by the majority of users. Task-based menu approaches are more effective than menus that follow strict organizational hierarchies. Focus on providing an excellent search experience and curation of search results for commonly used search terms.

Impossible to please everyone

In designing your modern intranet experience, it is impossible to please everyone. Focusing on your users and the trends of how your users and organization are changing will provide valuable insights on how to reach your audience effectively. The realization that there will be many types of users and a variety of engagement styles will allow you to focus on the strategies that work better within your organization.

Perficient, modern workplace partner

At Perficient, we are experts in the modern workplace, building intranet and digital workplace solutions that enable users to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Our modern intranet and portal solution, Rise is purpose-built to deliver engaging user experiences on the Office 365 platform. Our blend of enterprise software solutions along with expert consulting services allow our customers to achieve long-term success. If you are interested in learning more about how Perficient can help you modernize your intranet, reach out to us today.

Active communication is a vital component to a successful technology implementation, and speaking the same language (figuratively and literally!) helps keep all members of a team on track. To ensure you (and your team) are on the same page when discussing your Salesforce Community, use this glossary of key Salesforce Community Cloud terms and their definitions.

Answers

Answers is a feature of the Community application that enables users to ask questions and have community members post replies. Community members can then vote on the helpfulness of each reply, and the person who asked the question can mark one reply as the best answer.

AppExchange

The AppExchange is a sharing interface from Salesforce that allows you to browse and share apps and services for the Lightning Platform. See our community apps for employees and customers.

Best Answer

When a member of an answers community asks a question and other community members post a reply, the asker can mark one of the replies as the best answer. The best answer then appears directly under the question (above the other replies). Identifying the best answer helps other community members with the same question quickly find the most relevant, useful information.

Category, Ideas

Categories are administrator-defined values that help organize ideas into logical sub-groups within a zone. The View Category drop-down list on the Ideas tab allows users to filter ideas by category, and the Categories picklist on the Post Ideas page lets users add categories to their ideas. For example, if your ideas zone has the focus “Improvements to our clothing line,” then you might set up categories such as “Shirts,” “Jackets,” and “Slacks.” Each organization has one common set of categories that can be added or removed from each zone. An administrator defines separate categories for their ideas and answers zones.

Category Group for Answers

In an answers zone, a category group provides one or more categories that help organize questions for easy browsing. If the category group contains a hierarchy, only the first-level categories display on the Answers tab. For example, if you’re a computer manufacturer you might create a Products category group for your Products zone that has four categories: Performance Laptops, Portable Laptops, Gaming Desktops, and Enterprise Desktops. Zone members can choose one of the categories to assign to a question. Administrators create the category group and categories and then associate the category group with their answers zone.An administrator defines separate categories for their ideas and answers zones.

Channel

A channel refers to the medium by which an article is available. Salesforce Knowledge offers four channels where you can make articles available.

• Internal App: Salesforce users can access articles in the Articles tab depending on their role visibility.
• Customer: Customers can access articles if the Articles tab is available in a community or Customer Portal. Customer users inherit the role visibility of the manager on the account. In a community, the article is only available to users with Customer Community or Customer Community Plus licenses.
• Partner: Partners can access articles if the Articles tab is available in a community or partner portal. Partner users inherit the role visibility of the manager on the account. In a community, the article is only available to users with Partner Community licenses.
• Public Knowledge Base: Articles can be made available to anonymous users by creating a public knowledge base using the Sample Public Knowledge Base for Salesforce Knowledge app from the AppExchange. Creating a public knowledge base requires Sites and Visualforce.

Channel Manager

Channel managers are the internal users that manage your partners.

Chatter

Chatter is an enterprise collaboration platform from Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) vendor. … Employees can “follow” both people and documents to collaborate on sales opportunities, service cases, campaigns, projects, and tasks.

Community

Communities are customizable public or private spaces for employees, end-customers, and partners to collaborate on best practices and business processes.

Community Application

The Community application includes the ideas and answers features. The Community app is available in the app menu.

Community Builder

Community Builder and community templates for self-service let you create, brand, and publish a custom community that looks great on any mobile device! Choose a template to quickly start your community, and then style the pages to match your company’s branding.

Community Expert

A community expert is a member of the community who speaks credibly and authoritatively on behalf of your organization. When community experts post comments or ideas, a unique icon () displays next to their name. The Salesforce administrator can designate as many community experts as necessary.

Community Workspace

Community Workspaces offers a streamlined area to access all the tools that you need for building, managing, and tracking your community. Access quick links to frequently visited pages, catch up on release notes, and dive into Help & Training.

Customer Service Template

Allows users to set up a community that includes point-and click-customizations with Community Builder, collaboration, autocomplete search, self-resolution of cases through knowledge and case creation, sharing Salesforce records (with all the security checks in place, of course), recommendations, profile-based access, topics and topic email notifications, gamification, and rules to weed out trolls and bots.

Data Category for Answers

On the Answers tab, data categories allow users to classify questions in an answers zone. For example, if you have a zone for hardware products, your data categories may include laptops, desktops, and printers. Zone members can quickly browse within a specific category to find answers to their questions. Administrators can use data categories to control access to questions.

Data Category for Articles

In Salesforce Knowledge, data categories are a set of criteria organized hierarchically into category groups. Articles in the knowledge base can be classified according to multiple categories that make it easy for users to find the articles they need. For example, to classify articles by sales regions and business units, create two category groups, Sales Regions and Business Units. The Sales Regions category group could consist of a geographical hierarchy, such as All Sales Regions as the top-level, North America, Europe, and Asia at the second level, and so on up to five levels. Authors assign categories to articles. Administrators can use data categories to control access to articles.

Demote

If you dislike an idea, you can click demote to subtract 10 points from its overall score and decrease the idea’s overall popularity ranking. You cannot demote the same idea more than once, and after you demote an idea you cannot promote it. An idea can have negative overall points if more users demote the idea than promote it.

Email Alert

Email alerts are actions that send emails, using a specified email template, to specified recipients.

Email Template

A form email that communicates a standard message, such as a welcome letter to new employees or an acknowledgment that a customer service request has been received. Email templates can be personalized with merge fields and can be written in text, HTML, or custom format.

External User

External users are users with Community, Customer Portal, or partner portal licenses.

Flag

An icon that users can click on a question or reply to report it as spam, hateful, or inappropriate.

Guest User

Guest users can access public Site.com and Salesforce sites, and public pages in Communities, via the Guest User license associated with each site or community. Guest users’ access to objects and data is controlled by public access settings on the Guest User profile.

High-Volume Portal Users

Limited-access users intended for organizations with many thousands to millions of portal users. Unlike other users, high-volume portal users don’t have roles, which eliminates performance issues associated with role hierarchy calculations. High-volume portal users include both the High Volume Customer Portal User and Authenticated Website User license types.

Idea

Ideas are suggestions posted by the members of an ideas community and are organized by zones. For example, if the focus of a particular zone is “Ideas for car features,” an appropriate idea for that zone might have the title “Insulated cup holders that keep your beverage hot or cold.” Or, if the focus of a particular zone is “Ideas for our company’s employee benefits,” an appropriate idea for that zone might have the title “On-site daycare.”

Library

A file repository in Salesforce CRM Content.

Library Permission

A group of privileges that determines user access within a Salesforce CRM Content library.

Nickname

A nickname is a name used to identify this user in a community. Up to 40 alphanumeric characters are allowed. Standard users can edit this field.

Partner

Partners are the companies with which you collaborate to close your sales deals. For each opportunity or account you create, the Partners related list allows you to store information about your partners and the roles they play in the opportunity or account. A partner must be an existing account within Salesforce. Selecting a partner role automatically creates a reverse partner relationship with the associated account so that both accounts list the other account as a partner.

Partner Accounts

Partner accounts are Salesforce accounts that a channel manager uses to manage partner organizations, partner users, and activities when using a partner community or a partner portal.

Partner Relationship Management (PRM)

PRM helps you better manage partner relationships by connecting your existing CMS, delivering AI-powered content recommendations, and automating your channel marketing

Partner Role

Selection for an account on the Partners related list of an individual account or opportunity that specifies the role that the account has in related sales deals.

Partner User

Partner users are Salesforce users with limited capabilities. They are external to your organization but sell your products or services through indirect sales channels. They are associated with a particular partner account, have limited access to your organization’s data, and log in via a partner portal.

Personal Settings

Settings and customization options to help users personalize their Salesforce experience. All Salesforce users can edit their own personal settings. Depending on an organization’s user interface settings, users can access their personal settings from the Personal Setup area of the Setup menu, or from the menu under their avatar or name.

Popular Ideas

On the Popular Ideas subtab, ideas are sorted by an internal calculation that reflects the age of an idea’s positive votes. Regardless of an idea’s static total number of points, ideas with newer positive votes display higher on the page than ideas with older positive votes. This allows you to browse ideas that have most recently gained popularity, with less precedence given to long-established ideas that were positively voted on in the past.

Popular Questions

Each question’s popularity is based on the number of users who Like it within a certain amount of time.

Promote

If you agree with or like an idea, click promote to add 10 points to the idea. You cannot promote the same idea more than once and you cannot promote an idea that you have already demoted. Salesforce automatically adds your promote vote to any idea you post.

Question

An issue posted to an answers community. When a community member asks a question, other community members post replies to help resolve the question

Question, Private

An issue posted to an answers community but marked Private so that only support agents can view and respond to it.

Recent Activity

Your Recent Activity page contains a summary of all the recent activity that relates to your participation within a zone. For example, this page lists all the ideas and comments you have posted to a zone as well as the ideas you have voted on. You can view your Recent Activity page by clicking your nickname located

Self-Service

Self-service is any activity where the customer performs work on their own behalf without the assistance of company staff.

Share Group

A set of Salesforce users who can access records owned by high volume portal users. Each Customer Portal has its own share group.

Status

An idea’s status helps zone members track the progress of the idea. For example, “Under Review”, “Reviewed”, “Coming Soon”, and “Now Available” are common status values an administrator can define and assign to ideas.

Vote, Reply

In an ideal community, a vote means that you have either promoted or demoted an idea. After you vote on an idea, your nickname displays at the bottom of the idea’s detail page to track that your vote was made. You can use your Recent Activity page to see a list of all the ideas you have voted on. In an answers community, a vote means that you either like or dislike a reply to a question.

You can see most of these terms and more in the Salesforce Glossary. 

The key to success is putting people first. When companies apply a people-first approach, it pays — literally.

Putting that into action can be another story. With only good intentions and no clear strategy, people interested in evolving their business are faced with a painful and often overwhelming task.

By starting with the people closest to your brand, you can apply a strategy that supports all areas of your business, from people to profits. 

We show you twelve different ways how you can use communities to influence your workplace culture to benefit employees, leadership, and customers, and much more.

You will learn:

• Modern employee expectations —  and how to deliver on them
• What a community is and the benefits over traditional intranets or portals
• How to turn your culture into a competitive advantage
• Why we think the best communities are built on Salesforce
• Steps to get started setting up your own employee community

The biggest takeaway is actionable advice on how to connect with all the people and groups who matter most to your business.

Click below to view and let us know your community experience by tweeting us at @PRFTSalesforce.

Liferay DXP 7.1

Want to know what’s new in Liferay’s DXP 7.1? Here is your sneak peak. Perficient has been delivering digital experience platform and portal solutions using Liferay since 2011 and became a formal partner in 2013.  We recently attended Liferay’s 2018 Partner Summit and received a preview at what is coming in Liferay DXP 7.1.  Liferay DXP has already been named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms and with with the release of DXP 7.1, they are well positioned to improve their standing.  Here is an overview of some of the new and innovative capabilities you will see when DXP 7.1 ships.
First, here are a few important notes:

1. This is pre-release information.  It is subject to change.
2. Liferay DXP 7.1 is scheduled to release in July.
3. What is known as Liferay DXP today will be refered to as Liferay DXP 7.0 going forward to eliminate any confusion between Liferay DXP and Liferay DXP 7.1.

Now, on to the “what’s new” material.

What’s new in Liferay DXP 7.1

Search

“I can’t find what I’m looking for” is one of the most common complaints employees, customers and partners have when using websites.  Knowing search is critical, DXP 7.1 will use Elasticsearch 6 for its default search engine.  Previously DXP 7.0 used version 2.4.  Elasticsearch has become the leading open source enterprise search solution and the inclusion of version 6 into DXP 7.1.  On top of this a new administrative control panel will be included to configure, monitor and manage easier than ever before.

Content

One of the biggest improvements you will see in Liferay DXP is around delivering content and page creation.  Here is a summary:
Content Pages
Users can now easily create and add unstructured content to pages.    This is especially valuable for quick one-off pages such as for a marketing campaign.  Users can chose either new content pages or widget pages (the traditional method) when creating new pages.
Fragments
This is a new way to create and implement content designs.  Page sections can be saved as fragments and reused across a Liferay site.  This allows developing a library of designed components that can quickly be reused without ever having to touch code.  The fragments themselves can be edited in a fragment editor right within the browser and include HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Page Editor
Fragments themselves are not much use but that is where the page editor comes in.  This allows creating a page and choosing Fragments and then simply changing the content within those fragments and publishing a page.  Business users can quickly deliver new content without any HTML knowledge nor need developer involvement with the page editor.
Menus
Lastly, menus are now separated from page navigation.  Business now can create custom menus without being coupled to overall site navigation.

Forms

DXP 7.1 introduces extensive enhancements to forms making creating and publishing forms not only even easier for business users but they also are more usable for  end users to interact with them.  They are divided into several categories:
Usability
The biggest noticeable enhancement to forms are usability improvements.  This includes the following:
Form Creation

• Autocomplete
• Drag and drop interface for fields
• Multi-page forms
• Configured success page
• Duplicate fields
• Clone forms
• Autosaving
• Import/export data provider definitions
• Localization

Form Management

• Improved process for publishing and previewing forms
• Shareable form URLs
• Redirect after form submission
• Validation logic with regular expressions
• Custom messages for validation errors
• Workflow integration
• Email notification
• Versioning
• Reusable element sets for quickly creating new forms

Authentication

• CAPTCHA enablement
• User authentication

Conditional Rules
Advanced forms can dynamically build and adapt based on information a user supplies in real time.  Additionally a rules API is available to create custom conditions not supplied out of the box.
Fields and Properties
New fields and properties include options like a file upload, passwords and autocomplete.  An API is available to extend properties if needed.

User Experience

Adaptive Media
Adaption Media is an application that comes with Liferay DXP that dynamically adjusts images to fit the screen of the consuming device.  Administrators can control how images are loaded and displayed to account for custom needs for  organizations’ specific network requirements.
Blogs and Message Boards
Blogs and message boards now include new capabilities.  These iare the ability to create friendly URLs, displaying estimated reading times, opt out of email notifications, new cards design and integration with external video sources.  Message boards now support drag and drop for attachments, section renaming, category and thread grouping, notification management and an enhanced commenting design.

General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR)

GPDR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy that went into effect on 5/25/2018.  GPDR aims to give control of personal data to individuals while imposing rules on those hosting and processing data.   As part of DXP 7.1 there are new data protection tools to help address these regulations.  The ability to erase and export a user’s data upon request and administrator tools and APIs for third party apps are available.  It is important to note that Liferay DXP does not automatically make your application deployed to Liferay GPDR compliant but instead provides tools to make achieving compliance easier.

For Developers

Many improvements have been made to make development easier and allowing developers to focus on delivering business value instead of some of the more technical plumbing.  Some of these key improvements are:

• Modern JavaScript frameworks are supported “out of the box.”  These include Angular, React and Vue.js.
• Hybrid mobile application development leverages Liferay Screens 3.0 to build cross-platform apps from a single codebase using Apache Cordova or Xamarin.
• Modularity updates include new search applications such as search results, search bar and category facets.  These have been decomposed from the previous search application making it easier to use in page construction.  Message boards have also been modularized in a similar capacity.

This summary of new features in DXP 7.1 is not 100% comprehensive but it does cover the majority of them at a glance.  Remember, these features could be subject to change before DXP 7.1 is officially released.

Portal management is a key to delivering an effective digital experience. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that if users are dissatisfied with their portal experiences, they go elsewhere. As a result, portal architects must not only take into consideration the look and feel of a portal, but also the governance that keeps it running like a well-oiled machine.

Governance is defined as engaging people and processes to help build more effective systems. It can be thought of as the identification of which constituents are responsible for what functions, the processes to accomplish those functions, the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of those processes, and a feedback mechanism for continuous optimization. When considered in the process of building the buyer’s journey, governance is key in maintaining longevity, business results, and customer connection.

Here are our 5 considerations for developing a portal governance strategy that works.

1. Policies and Standard Operating Procedures: Within the development of a successful portal are key roles. Portal governance roles are specific functions performed by the portal team constituents to arrive at decisions on the portal. Typical roles can include project managers, system administrators, developers, and community managers. When constructing the framework for these types of professionals, ensure that their roles are coded out and benefit the organization.
2. Operational Communication: Day-to-day activities will need to be managed within the portal. In the governance model, it’s important to determine and define how the rules of engagement will play out. In some organizations, the individual who manages the portal from this perspective is known as a Community Manager.
3. Objectives and Goals: Governance is an ongoing process that should be monitored and optimized. The best way to monitor the portal governance model is to define a set of metrics. Metrics include the number of users present in the portal, revenue numbers, and content turnaround time. These metrics should be presented on a regular basis to leadership to communicate need and viability.
4. Governance Models: Portal governance can exist under a variety of different models, including centralized, decentralized, and a hybrid of the two. Each of these incorporates a differing type of leadership, whether from the center or with stakeholders. We will cover how these work in a separate comparison blog post.
5. Overall Strategic Value: The nature of portal governance varies with the life cycle of the portal, based on whether the portal is in the envisioning, implementation, or operations phase. Each phase places into consideration the effectiveness of the portal to overall business goals and the tasks needed to maintain the portal at that time. Furthermore, if the portal has lost business value, then sunsetting the technology is also an appropriate move.

Learn More

Are you looking to develop portal solutions for your organization? Download our guide below and get in touch with us at sales@perficient.com to start a conversation with one of our specialists today.

Today’s organizations must be more connected to their customer than ever. As the buyer’s journey evolves, leaders must also adopt the right technologies to influence positive business outcomes. This post is a part of a series focused on helping enterprises develop the necessary strategies and best practices to better connect with their customers. Check out the other blogs in this series.

Now that July is here, I thought it would be neat to look back at what our readers found most interesting last month. Below are the top five blog posts Perficient’s life sciences practice wrote in June – they’re ranked in order of popularity, with number one being the most viewed piece.

1. What Exactly Is An “Adverse Drug Reaction?”
2. What Exactly Is CX Methodology (And Why Should I Care)?
3. How To Determine Whether Your IT System Is Regulated
4. Why You Need To Think Of Clinical Sites As Your Customers
5. One Of The Best Ways To Improve Relationships With Clinical Sites

As always, thank you for your continued support – our team finds it very rewarding to have you as a reader.