Salesforce CMS - The New Kid Around the Block

By Rajat Kesarwani| Wednesday, April 01, 2020 14:25 PM | 4 min read

Highlights:

• Salesforce CMS to compete with the existing giants in the market, yet with a more defined motive for joining the game.
• The CMS is limited to Salesforce Community Cloud at the moment, with features such as Experience Builder and Commerce Page Designer.
• The spring’20 release includes CMS in Salesforce Customer Plans.

Debuting last November, Salesforce CMS is the latest and greatest (in the making) product launched by Salesforce. With a fresh approach in the Web Content Management market, the vision of the Salesforce Content Management System is not to take on the existing market giants like Sitecore, Adobe, Episerver but to deal with " Fragmentation of Content."

Motivation Behind The Development

Vice President of product management for the Salesforce Community Cloud, Khushwant Singh, shed light on the vision behind the launch of a product in a red ocean. Many customers have reported that using other CMS systems along with their CRM has led to the "fragmentation of content," which in turn leads to the recreation of content for different endpoints.

Keeping the above thought in mind, the launch of Salesforce CMS is more of an integrational step rather than competing with other CMS providers. For now, it primarily limits itself to the Salesforce Community Cloud. Executives from other companies have affirmed that they do not see Salesforce CMS as a rival and won't break a lot of sweat over its entry in the market. Salesforce still offers Salesforce CMS Connect, allowing its customers to use third-party CMS to embed assets in their Salesforce community.

What Helps Salesforce Get The Edge?.

For a company whose native expertise lies in CRM, paving its way to becoming a $17.1 billion company, Salesforce CMS turned a lot of heads when it entered the WCM industry. It depicts the company's aggressive interest in Content. To corroborate their faith further, in September, Salesforce Ventures, the company’s corporate investment arm, announced a $300 million investment in Automattic. Wordpress, the world's most popular WCM, is the brainchild of Automattic.

It's not the first time Salesforce has tried its hands on CMS. "site.com," in 2012, offered a hybrid CMS/portal, which was hyped by Salesforce as the "web platform of the future for inbound marketers." It goes on to show that Salesforce has always been committed to Content. At this stage of product infancy, it is tough to say what future path the company will choose for its latest creation.

Offering several other products like Salesforce community cloud, Salesforce commerce cloud, the company thrives to achieve one integrated CRM platform to help the customer connect marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams through one platform.

Challenges Salesforce CMS Aims to Overcome

Dealing with the manual and slow process of deploying content to these systems within the Salesforce environment, Salesforce CMS provides its users with tools like Experience Builder and Commerce Page Designer and the ability to drag content components onto the website, portal, or anywhere else on the system. With all these great features and problem-solving abilities, the most challenging obstacle that Salesforce eradicates is the ability to manage the visual presentation of record-centric content without requiring customization via code.

What is worthy of observing is how fast Salesforce can expand CMS across the entire platform. As of now, CMS works in Community Cloud for communities and commerce while there are other possibilities across the platform awaiting to be benefitted by CMS.

CMS in Salesforce Customer Plans

Salesforce launched its Salesforce Spring'20 release, including CMS in Salesforce Customer Plans. A majority of customers view Salesforce CMS as a complementary addition to their CRM rather than seeing Salesforce CMS as a standalone platform. The Spring'20 release includes Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods, which provides retail insights, Marketing Audience Studio that enables customers to improve the reach of email campaigns, myTrailhead for Customers and Partners allowing businesses to train and equip their external teams, and Salesforce Data Mask which enables customers to protect valuable information in their Sandbox test environment.

Salesforce CMS has turned out to be a pleasant addition to the Salesforce platform and has made the whole platform more intuitive.