Cost-wise portals are reasonable as compared to Salesforce community cloud. Portal is an extension of your CRM and users can access or view information limited to their account. Whereas, communities reside inside your organization and can be accessed globally.
Full Answer
Should you move to Salesforce customer portal or communities?
If you have the Portal, most likely you’re quite aware of its pros and cons for your company and you just decide whether you want to stick to it or move to Communities. If you don’t have the Portal – there won’t be any. Salesforce Customer Portal isn’t available for new organizations since Summer 13. Communities is your only option.
What is the difference between Salesforce portals and community clouds?
Portals and community clouds have the same structural features but differ in the way people interact with them. Portals provide external users the ability to access Salesforce whereas community clouds connect the internal users together in Salesforce. External users like partners or customers can communicate via Chatter in Communities.
What is a Salesforce community?
In 2013, Salesforce decided to switch to Communities as more collaborative and social working environment. And however confusing might the name «Сommunity» seem, it is not only about chat groups exposed to customers.
Is a customer portal the best way to extend Salesforce Sales Cloud?
For those customer-oriented companies who already enjoy Salesforce services and want to get more, the launch of a customer portal on its basis may seem to be an ideal solution to extend the native Salesforce Sales Cloud functionality. However, it’s not that simple.
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What is the difference between portal and community in Salesforce?
Portals essentially gave external users (partners, customers, etc.) the ability to access Salesforce whereas Communities is aimed at connecting the right people (whether internal users, partners, or customers) together within Salesforce.
How much does a Salesforce community cost?
Salesforce Communities pricing: Customer Community: $2 per login or $5 per member/month. Customer Community Plus: $6 per login or $15 per member/month. Partner Relationship Management: $10 per login or $25 per member/month.
Is Salesforce communities the same as community cloud?
The Experience Cloud platform enables users to build more than just communities, but build forums, portals, help centers, sites, and mobile apps to manage your organizations' content.
What is Salesforce community portal?
Salesforce customer communities are essentially support and self-service portals that allow customers to: Ask questions of customers and staff. Participate in discussions with other customers. Review other questions and discussions. Review published documentation.
Who uses Salesforce communities?
Companies using Salesforce Community Cloud for Customer Experience include: Walmart Inc., a United States based Retail organisation with 2300000 employees and revenues of $572.75 billion, AmerisourceBergen Corp., a United States based Healthcare organisation with 41000 employees and revenues of $189.89 billion, CIGNA ...
How many types of communities are there in Salesforce?
An organization can build a community to meet any number of needs, but there are three main community types in Salesforce: Customer communities. Employee communities. Partner communities.
What are Salesforce communities called now?
To better reflect the many types of connected digital experiences you can create—including portals, websites, help centers, forums, and mobile apps—Community Cloud is now called Experience Cloud. Where: This change affects all Salesforce orgs using Community Cloud.
What is the use of Salesforce Community Cloud?
Community Cloud is a social platform from Salesforce.com that is designed to connect and facilitate communication among an organization's employees, partners and customers.
What is the need of Community Cloud?
Community Cloud is an online digital experience platform by Salesforce that helps businesses across various industries to better reach and manage their relationships with customers, partners, and employees.
How many portals can you have in Salesforce?
Portals overview in Salesforce :- There are 3 types of Salesforce.com Portals.Self-Service portal.Partner Portal.Customer Portal.
What are the two capabilities of Salesforce customer community members?
With a portal for customers to connect with your business or brand, a Salesforce customer Community offers: Shared Information. Customers can find all the information they need in your Community. Community Cloud leverages your Salesforce data so you can share relevant information with your customers.
How do I create a community portal in Salesforce?
To create communities go to setup -> Build -> Customize -> Communities -> Manage Communities -> and click on New communities button . And enter name, description and url and click on create button.
When did Salesforce switch to communities?
How the Communities appeared. In 2013, Salesforce decided to switch to Communities as more collaborative and social working environment. And however confusing might the name «Сommunity» seem, it is not only about chat groups exposed to customers.
When did Salesforce stop portals?
Officially, Salesforce stopped its portals for new organizations in the distant 2013 and introduced a new offer instead – Communities (or Chatter Communities). At first sight, it seems that everything is clear and understandable: there were portals and now there are communities.
Why is chatter important in Salesforce?
Chatter makes posting messages, sharing files and keeping track of recently discussed topics a no-brainer. But these are not the only reasons Salesforce communities thrive.
Written By... Lee Garrison
Lee Garrison is VP Business Development at Magentrix where he is responsible for sales, channels and marketing programs.
Cost
One of the biggest differences between in-house development and pre-built third party solutions is the initial cost. Developing an in-house solution requires you need to invest both money and developer hours into the project before it can start bringing value to your business.
Functionality
A typical project would start with defining your requirements, but defining requirements from scratch is challenging because every department within your company will have contradictory needs. You will have to prioritize needs for the features that you include in the product now and in the upcoming updates.
Flexibility
This is probably the most challenging part of planning the development project. On one hand, it is not always easy to project future requirements, the number of users, or features that need to be pre-built into the solution.
Uptime
Modern organizations are moving towards offering services available 24/7 to their customers. Small organizations cannot invest tons of money in sophisticated technology stacks that offer load balancing, redundancies (ie. hardware, network, internet service), backup servers, disaster recovery etc.
Security
Nowadays, data security is becoming a major requirement for your business. Keeping sensitive business data safe from threats requires major investments into the right technology, expertise and trusted monitoring of your services. Provisioning security is also very time-consuming, dragging a big part of your IT resources.
Upgrades
Nowadays, technology is constantly evolving. Your custom-built solution needs to be updated on a regular basis, otherwise it will fall behind. When it comes time to make changes to your customer-developed portal, you need to get back to the original developers or consultant agency that did the work for you.
Cost
When assessing the costs of a project you need to look further than the initial building or acquisition costs. We identify three stages, each with its own associated costs: Acquisition, implementation, maintenance/support. In addition, you need to consider opportunity costs as well.
Acquisition
These are costs associated with building or buying the solution. In-house acquisition costs entail all project hours related to the project management, design, and development activities. Buy acquisition costs entail costs for the software such as license fees and (mandatory) onboarding costs.
Implementation
Implementation costs entail hours or other fees related to the implementation of the solution in your environment. With a build decision, these hours are often hard to discern from acquisition costs. That’s not a problem in your decision-making, since both these costs are one-off.
Maintenance and support
The costs of an in-house solution do not stop when it is implemented. Continuous maintenance is required since bugs will surface, legal/compliance requirements change, your processes change, and compatibility needs to be maintained. Bought solutions will have zero or very limited maintenance and support costs.
Opportunity cost
Very often not taken into account, opportunity costs represent the benefits that are missed due to choosing one option over another. In the buy vs. build dilemma, the opportunity costs are roughly ‘the benefits of what you could have built in the same time’ vs. ‘the benefits of what you could have bought for the same fee’.
Recurring costs
Perform your cost of ownership calculation over the period you intend to work with this solution. Keep in mind that maintenance and support, license fees and their associated opportunity costs are recurring. Bought solutions are likely to receive new features and upgrades over time without any added investment.
Risk
Every new component in a system carries some risk. It is good to identify these risks and take them into account when making a build or buy decision.
"Antique" Salesforce Portals
How The Communities appeared
The Process of Transition to Communities
Salesforce Communities Pricing
What Is Great in A New Product
- The key changes: 1. Improved branding and style configuration. Now the user won’t be confused leaving the website and appearing in a completely different environment. You can do much more than just basic customization available in Portals (colors, fonts, header, and footer). Visualforce framework gives you full control over the look and feel of you...
Is It Really A Dream?
The Final Note
Cost
Functionality
Flexibility
Uptime
Security
Upgrades
Conclusion