With the Winter ’18 Release, Salesforce will present branding sets for Community Cloud.

With this new feature, you can manage the appearance and style of your community. Now different users can see your community in different styles!

Just like you use criteria-based audiences to create page variations, now you can use them to create different sets of branding and style properties to provide a unique look for your community users.

In Community Builder, you can:

• Manage branding sets from the branding panel (1).
• Create a set of branding properties (2).
• Create or assign an audience to your branding set (3).
• Switch between a tile or list view of branding sets (4).

It means you can build one community and adjust it according to any business needs!

To get all the advantages of this new feature, upgrade your community to the latest version.

While the retirement of Koa and Kokua templates continues, Salesforce is providing a new way to keep your customers happy – it’s a Customer Account Portal.

The Customer Account Portal is an out-of-the-box template for Community Cloud. It’s a secure and completely private place for your customers.

Within this portal, your customers will be able to see and pay invoices, update their account information, and search your knowledge articles to get answers to the most frequent questions.

This template is designed with account management in mind. Therefore, you will see some amazing features there, including:

• Salesforce Knowledge. Provide information about your company or brand, and answer the most frequent questions with knowledge articles. Allow your customers to upload files (like invoices or claims);
• Use Salesforce Connect to integrate and expose data and processes from third-party systems;
• Customers can create and update their most vital information themselves in Salesforce records and custom objects (like updating their phone number or their address);
• Show important information for customers in their Member Profile.

As with any other Community template, Customer Account Portal has the same easy-to-set-up features:

• Admins can build custom pages and add custom branding
• Admins can expose some CRM objects and data to fulfil customers’ needs
• You can create personalised content for customers by using their geographical location and audience targeting.

That’s how, in only a few clicks, you can create the community of your dreams!

The Winter ’18 Release of Salesforce will bring some great new features to Community Cloud. For example, there will be some major improvements in the most popular template – Customer Service (Napili) and the Partner Central templates.

You’ll be able to increase customer satisfaction by using templates you build yourself or you’ll be able to use the Customer Account Portal Template.

Update Your Customer Service (Napili) Template!

The improvements to the Napili template include search and navigation, as well as many more branding options.

Here’s a short list of what to expect, if you update your Napili template to the Winter ’18 version:

• Decoupling of the search box from the community header
• Sleeker header component to improve your community’s mobile experience
• Improved UI
• New Global Search Component
• Improved navigation menu with more styling options and less custom CSS code (but if you have applied your own CSS, you can migrate it to the upgraded navigation menu)
• Lightning Design System principles in all content layouts
• New branding options – for navigation background and for text colour

Try the Updated Partner Central Community

The Partner Central Community also has some exciting new features. It now has a Resource Page with libraries and recommendations, and the option to package and export the Partner Central template. There is also a Path component for campaigns and custom objects (like Quotes, Price Books, Orders, etc.), which will maximise the effectiveness of sales processes for your company.

Customer Account Portal

This is something special! The Customer Account portal is a private and completely secure way for customers to access and update their own account information. This out-of-the-box community template is all ready to help you improve your relationships with your customers and to reduce your service costs.

Build Your Own Template

After the Winter ’18 Release, it will be possible for developers to build their own community templates. The Build Your Own template is a community template with basic, essential, system pages. Developers can build and add more pages and components to it, as well as being able to customise branding and themes to refine your community look.

And Last But Not Least – Lightning Bolt Templates!

The Winter ’18 Release will also bring several new Lightning Bolt templates. From the release date, you’ll be able to export any customised Lightning template in a Lightning Bolt package. This feature allows you to create and then export industry-specific solutions for Experience Cloud.