Top 10 Spring 16 Communities Features

The Salesforce Spring '16 Release Notes are available for preview.  With over 375 pages of content to review, its a lot to cover.  I created my top 10 list of new features coming in Communities.

Setup Changes

• Communities setup is now available in the Lightning Experience.
• You can now have up to 50 communities.
• Customer community supports up to 10 million users (up from 7 million).
• Community users can see encrypted data.

Emails on Every Post for Large Communities

• Before this was disabled when the group was over 10,000 members.
• Now, only disabled when over 10,000 members in the group have selected email on every post.
• Users may have been previously switched to Daily digest and need to use Email Me to change the setting.

Lightning File Preview Player

• The same file previews introduced in the Lightning Experience are available in communities.
• A SVG based file previewer allows richer render quality on document previews - no need to download and no more tiny screen view!
• You can even preview multiple at once, without opening each file.

Edit Posts with Files or Links

• Last release introduced the ability to edit chatter posts.
• Now you can also edit posts that included files or links.

 

Enhanced Leaderboard

• Drive engagement by showing where users rank in the community, including their points.
• Display users knowledgeable on a topic as well as their last activity. 

Enhanced Page Loading Experience

• Display a ghost version of a page until the page loads completely.
• Users previously had a blank page while waiting for a page to load.
• Enable this in the Settings area of Community Builder.

Share Wave Analytics in Communities

• This feature is now generally available. You can embed Wave Dashboards in communities.
• In Wave Analytics Settings, select Enable Wave Analytics for Communities.
• Communities users that have Analytics Cloud - Wave Community Users permission set and View Wave Analytics on Communities pages permissions can view embedded dashboards.
• Provide access by using Share from a Wave App or Dashboard.  Users then have read only access and can drill into and explore dashboards.
• Security predicates still apply.

Topic Catalog

• Through the use of Topic and Subtopics, you can create a topic catalog for navigation.
• Have up to 25 topics at the top level, 10 at the subtopic level and another 10 at the sub-subtopic level.
• Use the Add the "More Topics..." link checkbox when editing the Navigation Menu in Community Builder

 

Extensible Aloha Template

• The Aloha template can now be extended like Koa, Kokau and Napili
• Create pages, add custom components, customize App Launcher and provide navigation
• Must update to the Spring 16 template version

Improved Insights and Lightning Dashboards

• The Community Insights Dashboard app has been updated to provide filtering by absolute and relative date range and result sorting capabilities. 
• Dashboards in Community Management will appear as Lightning Dashboards in both Classic and the Lightning Experience.
• The update package will be available for download on the AppExchange after the Spring 16 release.
• You will want to map the correct dashboard version from Dashboard | Settings in your community after installing the package.

There are plenty of other new features coming in the Salesforce Spring 16 release.  What are you most looking forward to seeing?