These days every organization is expected to be able to provide access to an online community through which at the very least users of its products and services can share tips and insights with one another. The real debate now is how best to actually go about doing that. Some organizations have deployed a dedicated social networking environment to create an online community, while others prefer to create an online community that is an extension of their Web site.

Salesforce (CRM), on the other hand, has been making a case for a third way that is an extension of its customer relationship management software delivered as a service.

At a Salesforce World Tour event in London today Salesforce unfurled an update to Salesforce Community Cloud, a dedicated platform for building an online community as an extension of the customer records that are stored in the Salesforce CRM application. The new update adds the ability to better target customer recommendations using analytics, create a community without any help from the internal IT department using templates and the ability to use Salesforce Files Connect to access Google Drive alongside other third-party file repositories in the cloud.

Mike Micucci, senior vice president of product management for Community Cloud at Salesforce, said the challenge with building a community as an extension of a Web site is that internal employees are usually not engaged because for the most part they spend their days inside application such as Salesforce. Meanwhile, an approach based on a dedicated social networking application usually doesn’t have access to corporate data such as customer records built into the community.

Community Cloud from Salesforce, said Micucci, is designed to enable sales and marketing professionals engage members of the community within the context of the transaction the organization has actually had with members of the community.

In addition, Micucci noted that because Salesforce Community Cloud shares the same common application programming interfaces (APIs) with every other Salesforce application it’s a lot simpler for Salesforce partners to add value by building applications that span its entire portfolio of CRM, service desk, human resources and analytics applications that are all delivered as a service around the same set of customer records.

While Salesforce still loses money, it nevertheless is on track to generate over $6 billion in revenue this year. That base of primarily CRM customers clearly represents a large ecosystem that creates a significant opportunity for Salesforce partners to provide additional cloud application services that unlike other approaches all use the same systems of record as their core foundation.