Communities: The HUB’s move to Lightning!

We have covered many lightning posts and so we know the many reasons to make the move, so join us now: #BetterInLightning.

And of course leading by example, the recent news from Salesforce is;

The Power of Us Hub is transitioning to Lightning in April! (Aka Hub 2.0 – internally)

 

You may be wondering what is ‘Power of Us Hub’? Well, it’s the community empowered by and for users of the Salesforce Non Profit, Higher Education and Philanthropy Clouds. Similar to the success.salesforce.com but with these industries of focus you can only access if you have a login in to any of the above clouds.

The main reasons for this community to move to Lightning, aside of not getting stuck in the past, is to improve the user experience on the Hub community, have much more relevant content for you as a user when navigating, improve the mobile experience so you can get more of it when you access it on the go, take advantage of loads of enhancements that Lightning brings. Whilst the team has been as well working hard to limit disruption to community members du

** If you want some tips to make the move into Lightning check out our talk in Dreamforce’17

For this move, it’s worth mentioning some key sections getting an upgrade:

1. Welcome Widget
2. Homepage
3. Topics
4. Knowledge
5. Chatter & Profile

1) Introducing the Welcome widget

The main 2 reasons for this are the updated terms of use and to take the opportunity to get to know better new community users, similarly how it does today with the success.salesforce.com

The first time you login into ‘The Power of Us Hub’ as usual will prompt you with the above steps, once you review and accept the terms of use then you can update info about yourself and any interested products and causes.

2) New Homepage

Some examples of the new things that don’t exist today but soon will are;

• Getting started Resources Component

Initially released with new users in mind, but soon to be enhanced in the following iterations for content specific interests of the logged user.

Within this component you are prompted to perform some actions;

1. to complete your profile
2. Which is very important is to Follow Topics, this will enhance your experience through content specific to your interests.

• View Your Content

Curated content for you, when you follow a topic it brings related information to you. There you have few subtabs where the content is organised by: Feed Items (Questions / Answers), Articles, Ideas & People.

• Search, Sort and Filter

From your feed, you can use the text box to search, or use the filters on unanswered questions on topics you follow for example. The idea is trying to make it easier to uncover what the user cares about.

3 ) From Groups to Topics

Over all, and you may have already grasped this, but ‘The Power of us Hub’ is transitioning from structuring the data away from groups and into topics.

Topics are a more lightweight and flexible content management and easier to surface relevant data to the community members as these are grouped on more of a common theme. It works similarly to a #hashtag and can have a hierarchy concept.

One can easily access the topics landing page with a catalogue of all the navigational topics and grouped by that hierarchy mentioned, you do that from the tab Topics.

With navigational topics and by this I mean the topics that are set up by community admins to structure the community, which helps to find information and navigate around the site by the members. Then anyone can create other topics so you are not limited to the navigational ones.

When you click on a topic it navigates you to a topic landing page which is very similar to the ‘Your Content’, with some sub tabs: Feed Items (Questions / Answers), Articles, Ideas & People.

…Don’t worry groups are not going away! Both public and private groups will still exist just not as broad and often used as before. Think to use public groups for partner, community-led projects, event groups and private groups for things like study groups, student groups or private collaborative team groups.

4) Lightning Knowledge

So the knowledge articles for the Power of us Hub looks slightly different yet are the same concept: are created by internal content experts and contain information about processes, product documentation, best practices…

Some of the great things from the move to Lightning Knowledge in the Hub are that it will be much better organised with the left hand-side table of contents, it will feature best practices and customer service articles and the topics that we spoke about will be associated to every article; and of course, the team is taking the opportunity to do a full content audit, archiving and revising articles that will be available as well to the process to publish new ones and keep updated all the knowledge base. (thank you!)

This migration also comes with many ways to get to articles, for example: access articles directly from your personalised home page, or from the global search bar, from the navigation tab ‘Knowledge’ and from the multiple topics associated to the article, as the conversations others are having about it may come handy and be relevant for what you are looking for.

If you are using knowledge and not yet transition into Lightning Knowledge check this out as the architecture and objects become first class citizens. You have the transition tool to make it even easier and you can do it even when in Classic (ehem which you should not still be but worth mentioning).

5) Chatter / Profile

Last but not least, the look and feel for your profile landing page and the Chatter tab, will have a very similar revamp than previous items mentioned where you can ask questions from, and it will present answers and relevant articles and you can select topics related to it too.

Phew! That’s it for now, but if you still have burning questions and you are in the ‘Power of Us Hub’ use the topic #HubFeedback and the salesforce community team will help as they are monitoring and following all comments right there.

 

Aaand if you are coming to Salesforce London World Tour join us at the morning with Lightning Champions!

#ItsBetterInLightnign Are you coming to #Salesforce London World tour? Lets kick off the event for breakfast, sign up & join us: https://t.co/5h6C15Qn6H pic.twitter.com/AyCEDM6bMT

— Ines Garcia ☁️ (@Inescapinezka) May 3, 2019