Salesforce Communities replacement by AEM

[mk_aem21]

Hello All,

I am totally new to AEM from experience point of view and thus looking forward to suggestions from experts.

We have Salesforce communities(it is basically a normal website used for self-service for users) for support and self-service work portal.

Now, we want to Just replace the frontend of this Salesforce community portal(not the Salesforce itself) with organization AEM standard look and feel website so that the support and self-service portal also become part of main website of organization.

Here, what is the best approach for this replacement?

• Do we need salesforce and AEM integration. If yes, how ? and does it work for AEMaCS ?
• The salesforce community code is kind of coupled as flows comprising of UI logic as well as Salesforce backend logic. Do we have to move both logics to ui.frontend and core respectively ? Or there is any other way?
• Are there any documentation or 3rd party integrators that can be leveraged?
  
• Can we simply go ahead with AEM(frontend) - Integration(custom middleware/Mulesoft/Any thing else) - Salesforce(Backend) architecture and use API calls?

Any valuable suggestions will be really helpful.

Thanks!

#aem #salesforce #community

[Saravanan_Dharmaraj]

@mk_aem21 When you said customer communities , i assume all User Generated Contents? You need to have the new set up in AEM(Extra license) to AEM communities which includes the data stores(MSRP or ASRP) for storing UGC. If you are looking to bring some UGC contents from the salesforce(headless) into AEM and displaying it , then its a REST call from the AEM side. We have done that.  We also moved the communities from AEM(AMS set up) to SF (not the other way around) because of so many issue with AEM communities.

Also AEM communities is not supported in AEMaCS. 

[Mahesh_Gunaje]

Hi @Saravanan_Dharmaraj 

Curious to know about, what you said: "because of so many issue with AEM communities"

Usually, for the web CMS, company will compare Drupal with AEM.  For example, to migrate drupal application to AEM. Since, in Drupal, blogs/community are the nicest feature. Whereas in AEM, its not the case. So, if possible, could you please elaborate about "AEM communities" from your experience.

- Thanks

[Saravanan_Dharmaraj · Accepted solution]

@Mahesh_Gunaje Some of the major issues we faced during our implementation

1. Content moderation - very difficult in extending it to show more facets to filter and approve/deny

2. User sync - we faced many issues in terms of new users signing into community and that user node is created in one publish instance and that needs to be published to other publish instances through SCD(Sling Content Distribution) set up. It was so buggy, the sync was not happening and we have only 2 pub instances, if you have many more issues. Created multiple p1 request with daycare. 

3. There was no OOTB rate filter and spam filtering there to prevent spam messages in blogs/forum/ideas section. We tried to do block with Akamai. Lot of time went into clearing messages from communities.

4. Development - we need to learn one more language Handlebars for all the components. 

5. Adobe stopped adding new features and enhancements in community

many more.. issues and then we finally moved to Salesforce. . I wish it would have worked out better

[mk_aem21]

Thanks Saravanan.

Here with "Salesforce Community", I mean a portal for self help for users.
So, you can say, it is more of like anyother website with majorly static data and few dynamic data coming from backend(salesforce) and for frontend we are relying on ui.frontend module of AEM.

If you are looking to bring some UGC contents from the salesforce(headless) into AEM and displaying it , then its a REST call from the AEM side.

 Are the REST api OOTB from Salesforce ? How are you making this integration - via Mulesoft ? or have you written any custom middleware?

[Saravanan_Dharmaraj]

@mk_aem21 Yes we have custom code(servlets) to make call to Salesforce API and it queries the topics under /s/topic or s/article in SF and returns the results. 

One sample is here https://www.silabs.com/wireless/zigbee/efr32mg24-series-2-socs/device.efr32mg24b010f1024im48?tab=com... , the contents are coming from SF through our servlet. 

[mk_aem21]

Thanks @Saravanan_Dharmaraj 
It helps alot.

Any reason you opted to write calling Salesforce API calls in servlets ?
Can you please advise Why didn't you went for a integration/middleware layer like mulesoft or AIO ?

Also, as I perceived , it seems you are using only get calls. Can we use same architecture for POST calls to salesforce too. Eg: logging a ticket for repair of product ? What I meant to ask is would it require any other other integration specifically for posting something in salesforce for this particular scenario ?