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Tag: Communities

Get brand new ideas with Advanced Communities’ “Ideas Management”

This guest post has been written by Stas Dunayev, a Managing Director and Valentina Naumenko, a Head of Marketing at Advanced Communities (London based consultancy), a highly innovative team devoted to Salesforce Community Cloud evangelisation.

I decided to give AC a spot on my Nerd At Work because I used their great product on a personal project regarding the Salesforce Ohana Italia, and what a better way to promote a product that is available for free for our Salesforce Ohana! (ed)


We are Advanced Communities and we specialise in Salesforce Community Cloud. We have lots of Community Cloud components on AppExchange and we would like to introduce our most popular component – AC Ideas. 

The main point of our Community Ideas Component is to facilitate the Ideation process. In plain English, this means your customer or partner or even your own employee can create an Idea and other members of your customer/partner/employee community can then view, comment and, most importantly, vote for that Idea. After voting, you can see which Ideas are the most popular ones and decide whether to implement them or not.

The Ideation process can be employed by companies and organisations of all sizes and across all industries as an important part of product design. 

To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need first and foremost to listen to your users as this allows you to succeed in both growing your business and retaining your existing customers. You might be familiar with the Ideation process already as Salesforce as a company uses Ideas extensively for its own products. On the well-known IdeaExchange site (https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaSearch), Salesforce users have created thousands of ideas suggesting improvements and missing features and collectively contributing to the success of new Salesforce releases. If Salesforce uses it, why can’t your company do the same? 

Ideas Management used for Salesforce Community Cloud platform can provide fantastic benefits for any business: it allows firms to interact with clients as well as partners and to engage with their personnel within a community thus providing an opportunity to generate fresh ideas.

The Ideation process includes the following steps:

  • Generating and Gathering a great number of ideas from all your stakeholders that then can be filtered and selected into the brightest, most appropriate or most ingenious ones.
  • Reviewing. The status board enables you to easily review all submitted ideas and to reward your best contributors
  • Evaluating and Communicating keeps your community audience informed about the ideas status updates.

AC Ideas, an Idea Management created by Advanced Communities, provides you with a complete set of tools at each stage of the Ideation process. AC Ideas can help you leverage the power of Community Cloud and crowdsource new ideas as well as collect employee feedback and provide valuable insights to help you grow your business.

By employing AC Ideas, you will be able to:

  • Understand your customer or partner needs.
  • Stay in touch with your employees.
  • Step beyond straightforward solutions and generate innovative ones.
  • Explore new directions which you may not have encountered before.
  • Ask the right questions to your stakeholders and listen to their answers.
  • Measure and quantify customers’ demand.

AC Ideas is a lightning solution developed for Salesforce Community Cloud which allows you to get invaluable feedback from your customers and to identify their pain points or missing features in your products and services. The ideation process can and should help you with planning and creating a roadmap for your products.

So let’s take a look at how AC Ideas works.

1. After installing the component and setup of its settings, your users can start generating new Ideas. To do this, they can login to community, go to the Ideas page and click ‘Post an Idea’ and fill in details – the key information about an idea: its title, categories and description. 

Post an Idea Tab.
Fill in all the required fields

2. Now a new idea is posted! For more efficient management of published ideas there is a list of useful features:

  • Comments and Votes give your community a voice and provide clarity on what matters most.
Comments and Votes
  • Votes Threshold: set up the vote threshold, e.g. after exceeding the set threshold, the Idea will automatically change its status from ‘New’ to ‘Accepted’ and the product manager will get notified of this via email.
Votes Threshold

3. And finally, you get a clear structure of your ideas, obtained by using a Categories Hierarchy, as well as Filters and Advanced Search, that allows you to organise your Ideas page in the most efficient way. 

Categories Hierarchy, Filters and Advanced Search.

Since the component was launched on AppExchange it has been installed multiple times and is in use by thousands of companies and organisations.
The main version is free and does not have any restrictions. 

A paid Enterprise version is also available with lots of extra features and is in use by companies such as Australia Post, Mulesoft and Financial Force from this link. 

[Salesforce / HowTo] Manage/ Workspaces links missing from Salesforce Community

For this new how to post, welcome Akashdeep Arora, Salesforce Evangelist/Team Lead at HyTechPro. He started Salesforce journey in 2015. 4X Salesforce Certified Professional, 4X Trailhead Ranger, 5X Trailhead Academy Certified.Founder of #BeASalesforceChamp campaign.


It happens many a times when developers create Communities in Salesforce that somehow they are not able to see the Manage or Workspaces link, like below:

Let’s demystify the mystery without any delay.

Before creating communities, it’s mandatory to check the “Enable Communities” checkbox from Communities Settings in Quick Find Box.

Afterwards, search for All Communities in Quick Find box and you will see something like this:

Click on New Community Button and you will be redirected to choose the template for creating the community.

Choose the template as per your requirement and give it a name.

Then, you would be able to see your community like this:

Now, here is a twist in the story as you can see under Action, Workspaces and Builder link is missing.

You might be thinking what could be the issue?

Well, I’ll help you out.

The main problems is that your profile is not listed as a member of the community. So, you need to add yourself as a Community Member.

But, if you ain’t a member of a community, you can’t access Community Management to update administration settings.

Now, the question would be: how to add yourself as a Community Member?

You need to update the Network Id of the community URL that you created and Profile or Permission Set ID.

STEP 1: From Setup, enter All Communities in the Quick Find box, select All Communities, and then right-click the community URL and select Inspect. The data-networkId provides your NetworkId.

This ID should start with “0DB”.

STEP 2: From Setup, enter Profiles in the Quick Find box, then select Profiles. Click on the profile that you want to add. The ProfileId is the last part of the browser URL after the last “/” character in classic or after the %2F character in Lightning Experience (/lightning/setup/Profiles/page?address=%2F00e58000000n15c): this ID should start with “00e”.

STEP 3: Create a .csv file having two columns for NetworkId and ParentId.

N.B. Parent ID represents the Profile Id.

The CSV file should be formatted like this:

"NetworkId","ParentId"
"0DBXXXXXXXXXXXX","00eXXXXXXXXXXXX"

STEP 4: Open Data Loader and select Network Member Group Object. Make sure that you check the “Show all Salesforce objects” checkbox.

Browse the .csv file that you created earlier and map the fields on the Network Member Group object, start the update call and you are all set!

Now, go to “All Communities” in Salesforce and you will be able to see the required links:

Bravo!
You have successfully added yourself as a member of the Community and now, as a member, you are able to access Community Management using Workspaces link.

It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t stop.

#BeASalesforceChamp

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