The core Salesforce Platform consists of several products, as follows:
These products are all built around the core application framework and relational database that underpins the Salesforce Platform. In fact, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud can all be thought of as enhancements to the core Lightning Platform. For example, Sales Cloud has (among others) the Account, Contact, Opportunity, and Lead objects. These are predefined and interrelated objects that allow for a sales process to be quickly and easily set up and facilitated. They can also be thought of as a predefined set of objects and associated functionality that build upon the foundations of the Lightning Platform—namely, a relational database and application tier.
Service Cloud builds upon the functionality available in Sales Cloud (although Service Cloud and Sales Cloud are designed to address different use cases). Service Cloud attracts a different cost model than Sales Cloud, given the difference in exposed functionality to users, and subsequently is classed as a different product license.
Experience Cloud can be thought of as a lens into your Salesforce data, and several Experience Cloud license types are available. These are explained in the following section. Experience Cloud only exposes access to objects on the core platform, so that includes Sales Cloud objects, Service Cloud objects (if licensed), and Custom objects.
When designing solutions that require data to reside on the Salesforce Platform, consider the Standard platform licenses that will be required for your internal users. Generally, if a standard object offered by Sales or Service Cloud is designed to hold a specific type of data or is used to perform a certain function, then it is advisable to take advantage of it for the functionality built around it.
For example, use Sales Cloud when you require prospecting functionality because this is offered by the out-of-the-box Lead object. There are also features such as Lead Assignment Rules and conversion to create an Account, Contact, and Opportunity record. It would be ineffective to reinvent the wheel to create these objects yourself. Similarly, when you have requirements for Service-Level Agreement (SLA) functionality for your customers cases, Service Cloud offers the Entitlement and Milestone objects for this purpose. If you wish to provide access to your customers so that they can raise support queries or have issues with the products you’ve sold them, Experience Cloud provides the means to do this.
Now that we’ve covered Standard platform licensing for your internal users, let’s look at Experience Cloud licensing for external user access.
Experience Cloud is the way external users (those not internal to your company) access Salesforce. In this section, we’re going to look at the license types available for your external users.
Experience Cloud licensing works differently from Standard platform licensing in that each license type affects access to objects and record sharing differently. There are different types of Experience Cloud licenses to use when designing solutions—namely, these ones:
At the time of writing, the exam covered the Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Partner Community license types. Therefore, those license types will be the focus of the next section.
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