Community is one of the important features provided by Salesforce, where it helps Internal Users to interact with Customers and Partners in an easy and effective way. They can Chat, share files or search related documents from a business perspective. In Salesforce Communities, since customers and partners have the ability to interact with Representatives of your company, proper usage of this feature can make it highly rewarding.

Before enabling Chatter, Files and Content in Communities you need to figure out the Access Level and the Usage level for the community members. For example, if your Customers or Partners wish to convey some suggestions or bring individual ideas as per their requirement on your business products, your Customer Support team can understand their requirements in a better way if that conversation happens through Chatter. Customers and Partners can also attach some files onto the relevant records as and when necessary. To make the most of it, when deploying, think about not only how you will setup Chatter, Files & Content in the Community, but also how the concerned team will drive people into the Community to post ideas, share information through files and how you will define the success of it.

We all know that every technology has a few drawbacks. For Chatter in Communities too, we do have some limitations. We cannot invite Community Users into a Group that is created in Salesforce (we can invite our customers to it though). Chatter Groups should be created in Communities directly.

To get access to Chatter, Files and Content in Communities, the Community members should have access to Questions, Knowledge, Data Categories and also have the User permission “Salesforce CRM Content” checked on their User detail page and should also be a member of those relevant libraries.

Considerations before enabling Chatter, Files and Content in Communities

• Free Chatter users in your community don’t see any tabs except the Chatter tab
• If Chatter Tab is selected as Landing tab in community, the feed is the first thing that the members see when they log in. This option is good for communities where people will spend a lot of time in Chatter and won’t need a customized home page with additional components. You can also rename the Chatter tab if required.
• If a user self-registers for a community with Chatter Answers enabled, the Chatter Answers User permission is not automatically set for the user
• If you have enabled profile-based rollout for Chatter in your organization, guest users can’t access public communities until you enable Chatter access on the guest user profile
• We can restrict the size and type of File that a community member can upload. This white list of file types lets you control what a community member can upload and also prevents spammers in the community.
• We need to enable Community file moderation in the Org before you can limit files in your community. If you don’t see the option to limit files in Community Management, you need to contact Salesforce.
• Chatter Files and Content Deliveries allow users to upload new versions in Communities.
• Chatter File and Content Delivery support up to 2 GB of file size limit. Any document over 25 MB is not supported for online views

Best Practices

• By using Chatter as a sharing tool, we do not need to use large mail files any longer. We can also use “@” before every User name as a loop, so that the User can get an instant update.
• The Chatter group can be used as a great collaborative medium for communication and for transferring knowledge. In Chatter we can share files, documents, pics and videos for the Public Group at the same time as a Private Group. However, the external users who have no access to Salesforce data, can also see the files shared within the group and other group members can also see the same.
• We should be sensitive to the information that we post in the Chatter group, because the Document, File or any Pic may be interpreted differently by different members within that Chatter group.
• When Users are assigned to Content Libraries, avoid using public Groups. Public Groups are great for many uses from a business point of view, however they can’t be maintained for Library at the same time since the Administrator for Library can’t add or remove Users engaging a salesforce Administrator. It is always suggested that Users should be added to Content Libraries as Individuals.
• Whenever Content Delivery is activated in the Org and Implemented in the communities, always preview before sending the URL to recipients to ensure that the format of the original file remains the same in the online version.

Image courtesy: Salesforce