Migrating to Chatter Questions

Salesforce introduced Chatter Answers a few years ago, that combined Q&A, cases, as well as Salesforce Knowledge in one simple and easy tool. However, of late Salesforce has decided to replace it with ‘Chatter Questions’. This functionality comes with an improved and simplified experience that will seamlessly integrate into Chatter. Although Salesforce has never terminated any feature till date, it will be interesting to see what this transition has in store. Let’s dive deep into the details:

Why should you migrate to Chatter Questions?

Migrating to Chatter Questions is imperative as after the Winter ’18 release, Salesforce will no longer support Chatter Answers. You will no longer be able to answer, post or comment, or even view any existing Chatter Answers data. According to Salesforce, motive behind this move is that it wants to simplify and improve the Q&A offering and experience.

What are the improvements?

Chatter Answers and Chatter Questions don’t just differ in their terminology, but these differences also extend to the following:

• Complete Chatter functionality such as topics, likes, bookmarks, and @mentions
• Integrated feed for questions and posts
• Chatter feed available on profile, topics, groups, objects, and news feed
• Moderation and analytics rules & tools for questions in communities
• A feature known as the ‘Question-to-Case’ that allows you to escalate questions to cases. It also lets you post back to the question from the case publisher

What are its limitations?

While Chatter Questions has several valuable features as stated above, there are also several things that it does not have such as:

• Rich Text Editing is not available for answers to Chatter Questions
• Outside of Reports and Dashboards, no consolidated list view is available when used internally
• Differences in custom email alerts and customization options around workflow/ processes

What key points should you keep in mind?

• Plan your migration to Chatter Questions as soon as possible
• This change may either require a new community or the migration of your entire Chatter Answers data into an existing community
• You can easily get your data migrated to Chatter Questions object within the org itself, if you use Chatter Answers internally within the Salesforce org
• No action is needed if you created new orgs with/after the Summer’ 16 release of Salesforce

What should you keep in mind before migrating?

Before you make the transition to Chatter Questions, follow this checklist:

• Ensure that permissions are turned on to ‘Create Audit Fields’ and to ‘Migrate Feed to Community’ in the Salesforce Org
• Set user profile permissions as well as accessibility in the community. If you don’t have the required permissions in the community, your Q&A won’t be migrated
• Verify the amount of the amount of storage space in the community where your data will be migrated. The storage is for configuration as well as for the log files generated during migration

What happens after migrating?

When questions from Chatter Answers are migrated to a community,

• Reply records are converted to FeedComment records
• Vote records are converted to FeedLike records
• Question records are converted to FeedItem records

However, the length of the FeedComment field is smaller than the reply, hence only the first 10,000 characters of the body are migrated on API 37.0. After migrating, you must ensure that the content such as the posts created by you and those created by date are transferred successfully.

Salesforce Q&A App

While Salesforce has created a Q&A Migration app, built on the connect API to make migration easy, this app has several limitations and doesn’t migrate the following:

• A question flagged as inappropriate
• An answer marked as best
• Followers of a question/answer
• Reports on questions or answers
• Questions with more than 10 images on them

Want help with your Salesforce Instance?