Practical Salesforce Architecture

Chapter 6. Collaboration

The entirety of the Salesforce platform could be considered a collaboration suite (for the purposes of this chapter, we’ll define collaboration as “end user to end user,” where an end user can be a customer). But Salesforce is not a generic sharing tool; it’s a rather specific sharing tool. The Sales Cloud functionality is at its core a way for salespeople to collaborate remotely with a central office. Salesforce added the Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud, a.k.a. “Communities”) functions to enable even more granular collaboration between sales teams and customers. Salesforce objects like Contacts, Cases, Accounts, and Orders are all about sharing data with different sets of users.

Collaboration and social sharing have been very hot topics in the industry in the past decade. Digital transformations to empower self-service tools and collaboration have been widely debated, since it is extremely difficult to measure their value. The value proposition that each cloud offers involves its strengths and the other peripheral functions that it does well enough to keep you from having to buy other products. If you need Salesforce but not necessarily best-in-breed collaboration, you can probably save money and resources by staying inside this single vendor’s offerings. Managing multicloud and multiple best-in-breed systems adds a management and resource penalty that is not insignificant. This is another tipping point that can help you determine when it ...