Learn Lightning: Create Groups

It’s week 4 of my Learn Lightning series, where I share what I’ve learned about doing common Admin tasks in Lightning, comparing them Classic. This week, I’m focusing on groups – creating, editing, and some fun things only available in Lightning.

Why Create a Group?

Groups are my favorite way to engage with users. My email inbox can get overwhelming, so using groups allows me to interact with users in a manageable way that tracks the conversations and encourages others to chime in and help. The first group I always create when setting up a new org is called Salesforce Support. That group is where I can post tips, ask for feedback using polls, and direct my users to post questions. One of the best byproducts of creating this group is that it allows superusers to emerge – the users that start answering other user questions become my biggest supporters for new functionality in my org.

Create a New Group

1.  Find the Groups tab (might be in the More dropdown), and click the New button.

2.  Enter the name and description. In the information section, you can add anything you think will be helpful for the group members to see, including links. For my Salesforce Support group, I like to add links to some beginner Trailhead content and general guidelines for engagement.

3.  Next, you have some options to set the owner (if you want to select someone other than yourself) and to disable automatic archiving (which only happens after no activity for 90 days). You can also set the access type to public (everyone can see the group posts & content, and join), or private (only members can see the posts & content, and new members must request to join). If you are working with people outside your company or who do not have a Salesforce user license, you can check the Allow Customers box, which will enable them to join the group upon your approval.

4.  You also have the option to set the group as Broadcast Only. This is a really cool feature that is useful when you want to control who posts to the group, especially if you want to set up a group specifically for company announcements. For Broadcast Only groups, only managers of the group can post, but anyone can comment on an existing post.

5.  On the next screen, you can add an image for the group. I like to choose a simple icon to represent the group’s purpose, like a question mark to represent support questions.

6.  Finally, you can add users. Select the users you want to add. For my Salesforce Support group, I want to add all of my users since I want them all to use the group to ask questions.

Now we have created our group, the same way we would have done in Classic. But now we can add some more customizations in Lightning that we couldn’t do in Classic to make our group be more awesome.

Lightning it Up

As an Admin, I want to know how many people are engaging with each group. Using Lightning, I can actually put this data in chart form right on the group page. Here’s how:

1.  From the Group page, you can click on Engagement just beneath the Group header. That will show you a chart of Feed Posts, Current Membership, and total numbers for posts, likes, comments, and questions.

2.  This is great, but I can actually put this information right on the Group main page, and even customize the layout of the Group page using Lightning App Builder. Click the Setup gear icon, and select Edit Page.

3.  Once in the Lightning App Builder, we can drag over components to add functionality to the page. I want to see Group Totals in the main page. To add that, I just drag the Group Totals component onto the page where I want to see it. Note that I can also set this so that only group managers can see this component if I choose, which might be a good thing to keep my user’s page simpler.

4.  I also want to add a list of the active groups to this page so I can easily navigate between them. To do this, I choose the Filtered List component and drop it into the page. I can then move around any element on the page to make it look the way I want. After I have the page looking the way I want, I can save & activate it.

5.  Finally, I can add a banner image to make the page really pop. To make sure the image looks really good, I should make sure it is at least 1280×300 pixels.

Creating groups in Lightning is almost the same as in Classic, except that you can add more customization in Lightning. I really like being able to control what shows up on my group page, and making custom views for my users vs. my managers. There is so much freedom to create what makes the most sense for my users in Lightning, which is empowering as an Admin.

What customizations have you created for groups in Lightning? Have you added charts, rich text, even custom components? Show me @gilliankbruce.

Check out the rest of the Learn Lightning series:
Part 1: Setup
Part 2: Create an App
Part 3: Create & Clone Users