Experience Cloud (formerly Communities) is Salesforce's platform for building external-facing portals — customer self-service, partner relationship management, employee intranets, Help Centers.
Built on the same Salesforce platform as core CRM, but exposed to external users with their own license types:
- Customer Community / Plus — for customers (limited record access).
- Partner Community — for partners (more access, deeper CRM integration).
- External Apps / Self-Service — newer license types.
Common use cases:
- Customer self-service portal: knowledge base + case submission + community discussion.
- Partner portal: partners view their leads, submit deals, track commissions.
- Help Center: knowledge + FAQ + support form.
- Vendor portal: suppliers update their data.
- Idea / feedback community: customers vote on feature requests.
Built using LWR (Lightning Web Runtime) — the modern site builder that's fast, SEO-friendly, mobile-responsive — or older Salesforce Tabs / Visualforce templates.
Key architectural decisions:
- Sharing: external users get their own OWD column. Sharing Sets common for HVPU.
- Authentication: SSO via SAML/OAuth, or Salesforce-managed accounts.
- Branding: custom CSS, themes, components.
- Performance: external users on shared infra; performance tuning matters.
Implementation: 2-4 months for moderate scope; longer for heavily branded with custom components.