With the Spring'12 release we introduced Chatter Answers. This product allows the Salesforce customers to rapidly deploy self-service support communities in order to improve the efficiency of their support strategy and reduce support costs. 

Many Admins were familiar with the way our legacy Answers product worked and told us about the limitation of one community and we want to show how we have listened and enhanced our product with Chatter Answers.

To understand how the multiple communities feature works, we will take the example of a company (Cirrus corporation) that has 3 product lines and wants to create a community for each of them:

• Video Conferencing
• Wireless Solutions
• Routers and Switches

Only one Category Group can be assigned to Chatter Answers so all community data categories will be configured inside that single group using the tree structure of data categories.

One of the questions we often receive is how to split up the data in each community. Before we answer that question, it is important to explain what the boundaries of a community are. There are several factors to take into account in deciding how many communities to create:

• A community creates boundaries around a certain set of Questions. That boundary in fact determined by the data categories associated to the community. Searches are therefore on a community basis and bound to the categories associated to the community.
• A community has a specific language. That means that if you want an English site and a French site, you will need two communities.
• A community has its own branding. Because each community is hosted on a specific Visualforce page, a specific branding can be applied for each of them. The branding also extends to email notifications that can receive a specific branding (header and footer) on a community basis.
• Some other configuration settings are also on a community basis like giving the ability to post privately to customer support for example.
• One last element is around the list of topics for each community. Chatter Answers purposefully only supports one level of topics for each community. A hierarchy has proven to be inefficient for users by making the posting process too complex and tedious, resulting in more mis-categorization of posts by users.

Let's now return to our example of our three product lines, here is what the data category structure would look like:

Is this screenshot, we used the "Products" category group, and created three top-level nodes (one for each community). Below each node, we created the Topics we wanted to see in these communities. 

Once those categories are created, they will need to be associated to the communities as you create them. Let's have a look at the video conferencing community of our Cirrus corporation org:

The drop down of Data Category for Top-Level Topics presents a list of all possible nodes in the Category Group that is assigned to Chatter Answers. As an Admin, you will choose the top level for the corresponding community (i.e. Video Conferencing in this example). Choosing this top level will indicate to Chatter Answers that all the topics, one level down, will be shown as topics in the Chatter Answers. In this example: General Questions, VX5, Cirrus View and Web Cam.

Let's have a look at the Chatter Answers page and the list of Topics as they appear:

As you can see, we display the top level (Video Conferencing) and one level down (the 4 topics mentioned before).

By repeating this steps with the two other product lines we would have our three communities successfully setup.

Before we end this post, we often have the question around how to go from one community to the other when multiple communities are created in Chatter Answers. The answer is straightforward: each community has its own Visualforce page, as a consequence, there is no central page with all the communities out of the box. Customers have the flexibility to put links to each of those pages in a navigation menu at the top of their website, or in a widget on the side, or wherever they feel it makes the most sense. This is totally up to the site Admin to determine.

As an example for Cirrus corporation, we have created a community landing page like this one:

Each of the header links to the corresponding community page.

We hope this blog post has been useful to you and will allow you to leverage Chatter Answers to create self-service support sites for all your products and offerings. Please, leave a comment below if you have any questions.