Salesforce Sidekick

A peek inside my Winter ’18 pre-release Org and I found one awesome Flow improvement that I’ve been waiting for quite a while.  We now have a Flow Component inside our Community Builder!  There is nothing fancy about this component from the one we’ve got in our internal Lightning App Builder, but the fact that we can now display a Flow to our Customers and Partners without it being in Visualforce is fantastic.

Under the Process Automation Section in Components, you can now see the Flow Component visible for you to drag onto your page.

Use cases would include providing a guided experience for Case Entry, or a place for Customers to fill out a Survey.  You can make a Flow it’s own Page in your Community and set the page to be visible without a User Logging in by changing the Page Access.

Now, we do have some limitations (at this time) around what values we can “pass in”, so you’re not going to be able to pass in any parameters through the URL.  This does limit some of the creativity that we have, but for some of the basic use cases this will do just fine.  You’ll see below that it really is an exact copy of what we have in the Lightning App Builder.

As you can tell, I’m quite excited for this update.  I know that this will allow the use of Flows in Communities on a much larger scale, as now we don’t have to worry about the ugly Visualforce Page UI for the Flow being visible to customers or partners.