Online Community
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.
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.
In plain English
“Online Community is the old name for what's now called Salesforce Experience Cloud sites. They're branded web portals where customers, partners, or employees can collaborate, access knowledge articles, manage cases, and interact with Salesforce data through the web.”
Worked example
Yardley Aerospace launched its first customer-facing portal in 2014 calling it the Yardley Online Community - a branded Salesforce Communities site where airline-customer engineers logged service requests and accessed maintenance documentation. Over the years Salesforce renamed Communities → Community Cloud → Experience Cloud; the underlying technology evolved (Aura → LWC, new templates, new builders), and the Yardley site got rebuilt twice on the new templates. The internal docs still occasionally call it the Online Community and old support tickets reference that name; functionally, it's an Experience Cloud Site, but the Online Community label is what some Yardley engineers grew up calling it.
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
Migrated from older Community Cloud terminology to Experience Cloud as part of staying current with Salesforce branding.
Treats older Online Community references in documentation as the same as today's Experience Cloud.
Uses Experience Cloud (formerly Online Community) for customer self-service, partner enablement, and employee portals.
Trust & references
This term has been renamed to Experience Cloud.
View current pageStraight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Online Community.
- Experience CloudSalesforce Help
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is Online Community?
Q2. What's the current name?
Q3. What can you build with it?
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