Community Designer Vs QuickStart Communities

Why you need to make the move?

The new Community Cloud, built on the Salesforce1 Platform, is directly linked to Salesforce CRM and is customized to every member’s unique requisites. In fact, companies can now create branding specific communities much faster, using a community template on Salesforce Community Designer. With rich profiling, it has become easier:

• for resellers to update leads
• for employees to create and track service cases, and
• for customers to inquire, rate, and review products from within a community

What’s more with Communities?

Vanessa Thompson of IDC said, “Any company can benefit from creating an engaged community.”

Customer engagement through Communities has shifted to altogether a new phase with more diversifications and added ease-of-use features. With Community Designer (currently in Beta) as the latest addition in the Salesforce Community Cloud, you get 4 templates:

• Kokua: For Knowledge articles and case submissions
• Koa: For text-based and categorised, optimized for mobile devices
• Napili: For support communities and posting questions
• Aloha: For App Launcher access using single sign-on authentication

These templates are certainly proven engagement frameworks with aesthetic design work; however there are several limitations associated (discussed in my blog-“ What is Community Designer ?)”

You need to ask yourself:

• Does your current community include these objects: Ideas, Cases, Knowledgebase and Answers?
• Is your community responsive and needs to be accessed outside salesforce1?
• Does your community need features like gamification, custom objects, full text search, etc.?
• Is your community search engine optimized and easily found on web?

If any of the answers is a “YES” then you can get an award winning design up and running using QuickStart Communities^™. QuickStart Communities^™ come with all of the above features, with a quick deployment cycle, and extensive customization capabilities to match your brand identity without limitations.

While Community Designer may be a good choice to get started – as salesforce mentions itself – if you want more – then you need to consider force.com templating. QuickStart Communities^™ are built on force.com and come ready to deploy in beautiful 1, 2, and 3 column formats that are responsive, feature rich and customizable to meet the needs of Employees, Customers, and Partners.

Comparison of QuickStart Communities^™ and Community Designer:

	Contents	Community Designer	QuickStart Communities™
		Salesforce Objects
	Answers
	Ideas
	Knowledgebase
	Case
	Leads
	Opportunities
	More Custom Objects
		Design
	Responsive Design template
	Custom CSS
	Fonts
	Embedded Fonts
	Unlimited Pick and Choose Template Library
		Integrations
	Gamification
	SOLR Full Text Search
	Rich User Profiles
	Chatter*
	Google Events
		SEO Possibilities
	Tags
	Keywords
	Search Engine friendly URLs
	Bookmarking on Page Subsets
		Others
	Fast Deployment
	Migration
	Reports on activities
	Dashboard on Activities
	Support on Management

*Yet to be confirmed

Seamless and robust, QuickStart Communities^™ are just right for any tailor-made community which is responsive, engaging, and brand cognizant. This is what the QuickStart Communities^™ Patrons have to say:

David Skyberg, Product Manager

Ping Identity

Right from start, the QuickStart Community^™ Providers gave us the confidence that we do not need to have a plan B. Once things started rolling, they were able to accommodate a number of requirements that were made by the operating teams, within the timeframe.

About Grazitti’s Community Services

Disclaimer: Salesforce, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Communities, Community Designer, Site.com, Force.com, are all trademarks of Salesforce.com Inc.