Salesforce Community Cloud Software

Pros

Article management is robust, and allows for a lot of fine control on whats displayed, in both a wysiwyg editor, and jumping into the underlying HTML. Visual editor makes putting together the pages themselves very easy

Cons

Segmenting off articles between an internal and external is difficult to impossible. Any support issues go through India based agents, who constantly want phone calls and screenshares, and dont seem to know the product that well.

Pros

Community Cloud makes it quick and easy to put a basic site together that has access to your Salesforce data. There are several pre-defined template options + multiple out of the box widgets that make it possible to get something up and running quickly. A branding editor allows basic changes to the site's colors, logo etc. Access to CSS allows for greater customization.

Cons

Understanding how to work with the Community Builder takes some time and practice. Particularly with understanding how to create new pages, grant access to those pages and the different nuances between setting up pages in different ways. You can grant access to different content based on audience but managing those options can be confusing especially as your site grows more complex. The navigation menu, the pages, the page variations, and the audiences all work together with the Salesforce security model to determine what a user sees. Unfortunately this means there are a lot of places to check when something isn't quite right.

Pros

"Ease of use" is way too easy and is pretty handy for our users to adapt to this. Accelerators provided by Salesforce helped us understand this feature deeply.

Cons

Salesforce should do a better job in the area of customer support. Most of the times when I have questions about this topic - I prefer to search in the community rather than logging a ticket with Salesforce because of the tier structure they have. It takes days to get the issue resolved by Salesforce wherein someone from the Salesforce community will respond in few hours if not minutes.

Pros

Community Cloud is a nice edition for institutions where external users needed access to data. Higher ed, non profit, etc. Salesforce is powerful and the Community Cloud enables companies to extend the power to external parties.

Cons

Well... like other Salesforce tools & products, the Community Cloud needs a facelift. Heavy coding and customization or tools from Appexchange like Skuid could be leveraged to customize without coding.

It is easy to setup and fairly powerful.

Salesforce provides industry leading security best practise, so the data is secure.

Pros

Salesforce Communities provides a portal for employees, customers and partners. A standard interface is available out of the box with basic UI configuration. For advanced user interface custom development can be used. Standard Salesforce objects are used as database.

Cons

It is a relatively expensive solution. For small organization budget can be an issue. However the advantage is that it is fairly easy to setup a basic version of Salesforce Communicities.

Pros

As with other Salesforce products, the customization is key. This seems to have the least capabilities on all the clouds, but it is constantly improving, so there is that hope

Cons

The support and functionality does not compare in anyway to the other clouds. We recently had to change license types and the only solution was to re-create all our users because the technology was not there. Mind you,it took 4 months to get this answer since no one knows about community products in support

Salesforce give you a Portal, out of the box to engage with your Partners & Customers. From Case Management to Collaboration, to Sales. This product is fully customisable and gets better every year. Using Chatter, Knowledgebase, Ideas, SOS, Live Support and more these applications are fully integrated into your CRM, giving a 360 degree view of your Partner/Customers and increase engagement.

Pros

Chatter, knowledge base, full integration and customisation make this product an invaluable addition to any company wanting to increase engagement with your Partner/Customer

Salesforce is nailing it when it comes to communities & collaboration in general. They truly have gotten the tools down for what is needed to provide excellent communication with your community within your company & continues to only improve on that.

Pros

Great tools for collaboration.

I've used Salesforce Community Cloud for a few years. It's a nice collaboration tool, but it can be difficult to find things. I've used it when it's been opened up for a LOT of users. When this happens, a lot of the details and information is lost along the way. People will put information in a place where no one can find it. A thread can be opened and it can go on and on and never address the real question. I also find a lot of users will get off track and the thread because of a long topic for something else totally unrelated. Other topics will get started and not get put into the appropriate place, then the entire structure is out of date. That's when people stop using it for what its worth.

Pros

Our developers and customers love the salesforce communities. It's so easy to use and easy to build as well.

trying the product for the 1st time at dream force. and it is running extremely slow. I may need to try this at home as we are told that this product is free. May be better than google.

Pros

it is useful but running slow

Cons

good alternative to google which is the only search engine I use

love the community portal and the evolution of Lightening has made it so usable and intuitive.
customisation is key!

Pros

ease of use

Cons

reports and dashboards

offering is brilliant. the product pipeline is very well designed and based on customer needs. Highly recommend and very well adoptive for business

Our customers just love Salesforce communities and so does our development team. Its easy to develope and configure the product as its just point and click.

Community cloud lets my userscommunicate both internally and with customers. I love community because it allows people to do their own trouble shooting with knowledge articles and answers from other customers.

The Salesforce Community Cloud is an incredible tool for knowledge centered support. When we launched our first Community, we saw a 30% reduction in cases from that customer segment. Users and partners can be given access to your knowledge base, can review and manage their cases, and can collaborate with others. If the customer can¿t find what they need in the discussion groups or your knowledge base, they can quickly get help from your agents. With live message support, video S.O.S. support, and social media support, you can help your customers in the way that suits them. The best part is that it¿s all part or your Salesforce platform. With a 360 degree view of each customer, your support agents can easily access any information they need to resolve each issue.

Salesforce offers a very comprehensive engagement feature set for your customers, partners, prospects, and other segment audiences you may support. The beautiful thing is that all the discussions, Chatter groups, ideation, knowledgebase, and other community features are combined into the CRM so that customer process flows are streamlined and all available under one single sign-in. A truly omni-channel experience with a promising and growing feature set.

Pros: Easy to build and launch community templates. Extremely responsive customer service and support. Ability to integrate community function with entire SF ecosystem.
Cons: May be more difficult to deploy for non Salesforce customers but still possible. Product is evolving, being updated rapidly and frequently so you have to keep up with new functionality as it is added.
I have deployed SF community platform in a B2B setting and am happy to have our community function integrated with our existing CRM system of record. This allows me to utilize existing admin and dev. resources for configuration and customization. Overall a solid choice and the company has been incredibly responsive to our needs thorough out the process.