SharePoint Online 2013 - Community site

Introduction
Every version of SharePoint contained a list called the discussion board. Let's be honest, this was a poor man's version of a real Internet forum. The options were very limited and we did not see a lot of use of it within companies. A lot of third parties created custom forum solutions, such as the Social Squared web part from Lightning Tools.

SharePoint 2013 comes with a new site template called the Community site. Can this finally be a descent and fully functional forum within SharePoint? I would like to show you this new template. Let's start!

Activation and configuration
The Community site template needs to be activated as a site collection feature before it can be used. Enable the following site collection feature: SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features. After that the Community Site feature can be activated at the site level. The template is now available and every user, with create site permissions, can create a new community site.

Before you communicate the new community to your users a couple settings need to be configured. We can use the Community tools section for this.

Categories
You should start with defining categories. A category can be attached to a discussion. Click at New item:

I advise you to use a description and add a picture. This makes the categories more informative and interactive for the members:

Reputation settings

The reputation settings kind of speak for themselves. Do you want to use rating? Do you want to use an achievement system? What levels are there and how many points do you assign to certain actions? This is were you configure these settings. There is also an option called gifted badges. By assigning a badge to a member you can specify his or her role, for example InfoPath Expert. A  member with a lot of InfoPath knowledge can easily be recognized by the other members:

So think about the badges you would like to use and create these here. You can assign them at any moment by going to Assign badges to members.

Community settings

There are only two options here. You can set the date the community was established and decide if members can report "offensive" replies or topics. This is a cool and essential forum feature. I will show you how this works a bit later.

You are now done! So spread the word about the awesome new community in your SharePoint portal :-)

Join the community
All the users with read permissions should be able to join the new community. They will see the following option:

The user can click at the button and automatically joins the community and becomes a member. He or she can start creating discussions and leave replies. Members can leave the community at any moment by clicking Members, in the quick launch, and press the Leave this community button. I was curious if a member would lose the member reputation points and other statistics, but after leaving and joining they were still there.

Creating discussions

Your members can create new discussions:

Do you see the option Question? By selecting this option, the members are able to mark a reply as best answer. This will look as following:

The reply is marked as Best reply and will also be displayed under the first post, above all the other replies. The owner of the community and the author of the discussion can remove a reply marked as best reply. There can only be one best reply. 

Video
Every member is able to leave a reply, no surprise here, but can also use pictures and even video's! That is a great feature, let's take a look:

The above example shows an embed video added by a member. There are more options such as Like (with an integration with the Personal Site) and reporting offensive replies.


Moderators in action
Every reply has the call out menu, there is the option Report to Moderator. How does this work? In my example (this is all fake of course ;-)) Paul does not like my reply:

Theo reads this and does not appreciate this comment from Paul so he wants to report it to a moderator:

The Community site comes with a new SharePoint group called 'Site name' Moderators. A user added in this group is a moderator for the Community discussions. The moderator will see an extra option in the Community tools overview: Review reported posts:

The moderator can select the reply and has four options:

Review Reports
The whole reply is visible and can be edited, deleted or dismissed. All the other reports, about this reply, are also visible.

Edit post
The moderator can edit the post but after the edit nobody can see that a moderator edited the reply. There is no notification or something else so members can see the reply has been edited by a moderator.

Delete post
The moderator can delete the entire reply.

Dismiss
This option dismisses the report but there is no notification send to the members about this update.

You would also expect an e-mail to be sent to the moderators but that option is not available (at the moment?). I really hope this feature will be added in the final release.

Quick launch
The members can browse through the community by using the quick launch. Let's take a look!

Home

The home page of the community displays the recent discussions with statistics such as the author, amount of replies and likes. The member can filter discussions based at what's hot, my discussions, unanswered questions, discussions with best replies and featured. The owner of the community and the moderators can set a discussion as featured. These are really useful filters, especially when communities get bigger and bigger!

Categories

In the beginning of this blog post I showed you how to create new categories. This section shows all of them. The members have a couple of filter options such as alphabetical order, what's hot and recent. I am guessing that what's hot is based at the amount of discussions and replies within a category. The right section shows some statistics and the top 4 contributors. 

Members

The members overview shows all the community members with filter options such as top contributors, new members and alphabetical order. The right side shows the statistics of the logged in member. He or she can also decide to leave the community.

About

The last part is the about section. Information about the community should be displayed here. The owner can change the text and add some pictures.

Conclusion
The Community site is a huge step forward from the discussion board. It contains functionalities that users expect such as like and replying with pictures and video's. The achievements system also makes it more fun! I cannot wait to start showing this to our customers and even implementing it in our own Intranet portal.

I have a lot of praise but I am also still missing some features or see some issues.

No outline of replies
All the replies, apart from best reply, are displayed under each other. This makes it confusing to easily see a reply to a reply. I would like to see a reply to a reply outlined to the right of the original reply.

No quoting
There is no option to quote a reply.

No e-mails
There is no e-mail configuration menu such as in the Personal Site. I would like the moderators to receive an email when a members marked a reply as offensive. I think it is also nice when a member receives an e-mail update about actions taken to a offensive post report.

No moderator remarks
Once a moderator edited a reply, there is no clear notification this happened. I would like to see this in the reply.

No close option
There is no option to close a discussion. It can only be deleted. This is strange because every forum I have worked with contains this feature.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Please leave a reply if you have any comments :-)

Posted in: SharePoint Online 2013