Definition
The former name for Salesforce Experience Cloud sites, referring to branded web portals where customers, partners, or employees could collaborate, access knowledge articles, manage cases, and interact with Salesforce data.
Real-World Example
When a platform engineer at NovaScale needs to streamline operations, they turn to Online Community to enhance the organization's Salesforce footprint with additional functionality. By leveraging Online Community, the team avoids building a custom solution from scratch, saving months of development time while gaining enterprise-grade features out of the box.
Why Online Community Matters
Online Community is the former name for Salesforce Experience Cloud sites, referring to branded web portals where customers, partners, or employees could collaborate, access knowledge articles, manage cases, and interact with Salesforce data. The product has gone through several names: Customer/Partner Portals, then Communities, then Community Cloud, and now Experience Cloud. Each name refers to essentially the same concept of branded external-facing Salesforce sites.
Knowing the name history matters for reading older Salesforce documentation, training materials, and blog posts that may use any of these terms. Functionally, modern Experience Cloud is the evolution of all these earlier products, with significantly more capabilities and a more flexible architecture. New community deployments should use Experience Cloud terminology and Lightning Bolt templates rather than legacy approaches.
How Organizations Use Online Community
- •BrightEdge Solutions — Migrated from older Community Cloud terminology to Experience Cloud as part of staying current with Salesforce branding.
- •NovaScale — Treats older Online Community references in documentation as the same as today's Experience Cloud.
- •Vertex Global — Uses Experience Cloud (formerly Online Community) for customer self-service, partner enablement, and employee portals.