Get Started with Salesforce CMS
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you'll be able to:
- Describe the benefits of Salesforce CMS.
- Explain which Salesforce tools help you create, organize, and publish content.
Salesforce Meets the World of Content Management
As Bill Gates once famously wrote, content is king. Content is what hooks customers to a site, and what makes them stay. Content is what keeps your partners and customers up to date, and allows them to make informed decisions.
Content is king, for sure, but the kingmaker is your content management system (CMS for short). You can have the best content in the world, but if updating content is laborious, or if content is poorly organized and hard to find, it benefits no one. So when Salesforce announced the inception of Salesforce CMS, we could hear cries of joy from far and wide.
Salesforce CMS is available in Lightning Experience, and is a unified shared service for all of Salesforce. What does that mean, exactly? It means that you can create content and extend it to any channel built on Salesforce, such as a commerce site, a marketing email, or a partner portal, to name a few examples. What’s more, you can use the same content on channels outside of Salesforce. And you can personalize content for different audiences to enhance their experience.
You can use Salesforce CMS to create and manage the content lifecycle from draft to publication and every stage in between. Salesforce CMS is an excellent tool for any use case, but it’s especially good for creating content that increases awareness of your organization, products, or services.
If you need to create content to answer customer questions, address support cases, or explain processes, that’s a job for Salesforce Knowledge.
In addition to traditional content types (think news articles, images, and documents), Salesforce CMS lets you create custom content types to meet your unique business needs. And no matter what you choose to create, you can then distribute your content to any touchpoint and deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. At the end of the day, Salesforce CMS becomes your one-stop shop for all things content.
Let’s look at how Salesforce CMS transforms your company’s content creation and sharing strategies.
Content Creation Is a Team Effort
Getting good content out the door is a team effort, so let’s meet the team creating quality content for Tucker Home Goods.
Tucker Home Goods sells furniture and lighting fixtures to large retailers and wholesalers across the globe. The company is an existing Salesforce customer, and uses Sales, Service, Commerce, and Experience Clouds. Recently, Tucker Home Goods added Salesforce CMS into the mix, and the whole content team is thrilled.
The Tucker Home Goods content team includes their Salesforce admin, Chris Garcia; marketing manager, Sheng Ng; merchandising manager, Elle Jordan; and copywriter, Calvin Wright. Sheng, Elle, and Calvin create all of the content for Tucker Home Goods, including marketing materials, product listings, and more. Salesforce CMS will streamline how this creative team delivers detailed product information across channels.
Demystifying the Digital Experiences App and Salesforce CMS
Everyone on the Tucker Home Goods team has different roles and permissions, so they each navigate to different parts of Salesforce to do their work. But in general, most of the content creation magic happens in the Digital Experiences app and Salesforce CMS. Here’s a rundown of where they do each task.
Digital Experiences App
The team accesses the Digital Experiences app from the App Launcher in Salesforce. This app allows folks with the right permissions to create content, manage its lifecycle, and assign content to publishing channels such as a site, community, Marketing Cloud Engagement, or Lightning apps. Chris, Sheng, and Elle have varying degrees of access to this app.
CMS Workspaces
CMS workspaces are at the core of how you create, organize, and manage content for all of your publishing channels. They’re the primary organizing and security principle in the Digital Experiences app. And they give you granular control over who’s creating content and where the content is delivered. Chris, the Salesforce admin, has permission to create CMS workspaces.
Salesforce CMS supports two types of workspaces: enhanced and non-enhanced.
Enhanced CMS workspaces are part of the enhanced sites and content platform, which is a flexible system that connects Salesforce CMS to Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) sites. In addition to LWR sites created after Winter ‘23, enhanced LWR sites, and enhanced channels, these workspaces can publish content to Aura sites. Enhanced CMS workspaces allow you to better manage the content translation lifecycle, to create manual collections for LWR sites, and to manage content with workflows. As of Winter ‘25, any CMS workspace that Chris creates is enhanced by default.
Non-enhanced CMS workspaces are useful for publishing content to channels like the B2C Commerce Page Designer or existing LWR sites created before Winter ‘23. If Chris needs to create a non-enhanced CMS workspace, she must enable the setting Create both CMS workspaces and enhanced CMS workspaces in Setup.
In the hands-on challenges in Units 2 and 3, you’ll use an enhanced CMS workspace.
Experience Builder
Experience Builder is a flexible tool for building Aura and LWR sites that lets customers, partners, and employees consume the content the admin chooses to surface. Chris has permission to create sites and provide access to Experience Builder.
Chris creates an enhanced LWR site to serve as Tucker Home Goods’s ecommerce site. When the content team creates and publishes content from their enhanced CMS workspace, Chris can use Experience Builder to display and customize content on the site.
Because the enhanced LWR site is a part of the enhanced sites and content platform, Tucker Home Goods can benefit from tools such as workflows, improved search, partial site deployment, and granular publishing.