A few thoughts:
- Separate community categories and use custom roles to permission which types of customers can see the forum, post, or reply to topics.
- This would require a solution where you give a custom role to each customer user depending on the product(s) they use. If the one product has a smaller customer base, you could potentially only do it for those customers.
- Hopefully you could automate something from your CRM to add a custom role via the API.
- Each should have a “Product Area” setup for Ideas and Product Updates.That way you can setup the product updates with the ability for them to filter by their product.
And if you do #1 and have someone who can really get into custom scripts and custom CSS, you could even personalize your home page for some widgets to show to some users and others to show to others.
But, if it were me, I’d probably repurpose the community overview page or the knowledge base overview page into a niche “home” type page for the second, smaller product. Or do something like InSpired has for the home page that links to two main areas, and then use the Community and KB overview pages to make micro-home pages for featuring the most relevant links and posts for each customer base.
Adding to what @DannyPancratz said, I wanted to give you a good example how you can customize the different areas to match the branding of the different products.
Hello bank! is a smaller brand of BNP Paribas, so they do have their own sub-communities and Knowledge Base on the same platform. They have added some custom script to change the styling elements in pages that are about Hello bank!:
Hello bank! Knowledge Base
BNP Paribas Knowledge Base
Regarding the other points: I would create a seperate space for the smaller group of the two, only giving access via custom user role. If that space is hidden to the rest of the users, and you message to users that they have special access, this would also make it less likely that users would end up in the wrong category with their question. You can automate that e.g. by giving these users a special rank that is tied to such a message.
@Julian We are considering a similar experience set up for our Strategic Partners however we don’t want them to have access to anything that our current user base has access to (essentially a totally different home page experience that would prevent them from navigating back to our current homepage). It looks like the use case you link to above has two separate URLs. Do they technically have two separate communities?
Are there any other solutions for our use case?
Adding @darylard for awareness
The community I linked to above does not have two separate urls, in the sense of different domains.
I think a lot could be done if the domain can remain the same. The example above shows that we can customize styling / UI elements. What we cannot do is to have two separate sets of email notifications. If the styling / wording etc. must not be the same for both target audience, this could become a blocker, simply as there is no workaround available here. Outside of this, I do not think that there is much in the way of establishing a second community next to the existing one.
This is specific to your community however, as all users / categories have specific custom roles and permissions. It would be a blocker if there would be “regular” users with no special permissions: If you allow all registered users to see something, you cannot take away such a right via custom role.
