Federated Search is an addon that enhances your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community search by automatically including content from external platforms, such as Salesforce. This broader search provides a real benefit to your users: they get more results, from multiple sources, returned to them in a central location -- but, presented on separate tabs to help keep them distinct.
To take advantage of this feature, you must enable and configure your preferred Search Connector in Vanilla.
This article focuses on the Salesforce search connector, Salesforce Article Search.
✔️ TIP: Before starting, retrieve your Salesforce Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from your Salesforce App Manager.
Enable & configure Salesforce Article Search
1. Navigate to Settings > Addons > Federated Search (/settings/federated-search) in your Dashboard.
2. On the Search Connectors page, locate the Salesforce Article Search search connector and slide the toggle to the right to enable it.
3. Click the pencil icon to open the settings dialog and configure the settings, all of which are required.
- Label: The name that displays on this connector's dedicated tab on the search results page.
📝 NOTE: The search connector's tab is "dedicated" because i) the search connector's results should display only on this tab and ii) no other search connector's results should display on this tab. If either of these scenarios occur, contact Vanilla Support. - Site domain: The full URL of your Salesforce community instance, such as https://example.develop.my.site.com.
- Client ID: You can retrieve this (the Consumer Key) from your Salesforce App Manager.
- Client Secret: You can retrieve this (the Consumer Secret) from your Salesforce App Manager.
- Allowed Roles: At least one role must be selected. Select all Roles in order to include Salesforce in Vanilla searches for all users.
4. Click Authenticate to verify your credentials and the connection to Salesforce.
5. Click Save.
The search connector setup is complete and Salesforce will be included in user searches in Vanilla.
✔️ TIP: You can return here to enable and disable the search connector with the toggle.
Salesforce Article Search results tab
After the search connector has been set up and enabled, do a test search to ensure that:
- the connected content repo is being "pinged";
- the results that display are relevant to the search term;
- the results display on the dedicated tab only; and
- results from other repos don't display.
