Experience Cloud

Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) is a Salesforce product that lets organizations build branded digital experiences such as customer portals, partner portals, help centers, and forums. These sites give external users secure access to relevant Salesforce data and functionality without needing a full Salesforce license.

Customer portals, partner portals, help centers, internal employee hubs, public communities - each is a website with users, content, and access rules backed by Salesforce data. Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) is the platform that makes building one a configuration exercise instead of a development project. Pick a template, brand it, set up sharing rules for the guest or registered users, and you have a branded site running on the same data model as your CRM.

The reason it's strategic is reach. Internal Salesforce licenses are expensive and inappropriate for non-employees; Experience Cloud user licenses are cheaper and scoped to the tasks external users actually need to do. A help center for thousands of customers, a partner portal for hundreds of resellers, a community for an industry forum - each is feasible only because the licensing model and platform built into Experience Cloud match the audience. Plan your external-user strategy around it from day one.