■ ■ Planning My Sites ■
■ Planning social permissions ■
■ Planning user profiles ■
■ Planning activity feeds ■
■ Planning connections
Planning communities
New in SharePoint 2013, Community Sites provide forums for people to ask and answer questions, post information, comment on posts, and be rewarded for their efforts in the form of points, earned badges, and gifted badges. Those familiar with the Microsoft forums should see many similarities. Much of the functionality in those forums has been built into the SharePoint Communities Sites. Additional components found in social networks, such as “lik- ing” a post, are also included. This set of functionality can be extremely powerful in encour- aging the sharing of knowledge and contributing of content. It’s also most effective when the forum aligns with real business goals; building a community site just for the sake of trying to encourage social computing doesn’t use communities effectively and will most likely fail.
You can add community features to an existing site, but a Community Site template is available. Discussion lists and the community features also have a bit of overlap. Therefore, SharePoint 2013 users have the following three options for community features:
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■ Add a discussion list to an existing site. ■
■ Enable the community feature on an existing site. ■
■ Create a community site based on the template.
The choice depends on the business needs, but if your organization needs a center of knowledge sharing, a community site is typically the way to go. If an existing site needs the Community Sites features, you can turn them on by following these steps:
1. Navigate to the site that needs the community features enabled. 2. Go to the site settings of the site.
3. Select Site Features under Site Actions.
4. Click Activate in the Community Site Feature section, as shown in Figure 2-1.
IMPORTANT ENABLING THE COMMUNITY SITE FEATURE
The SharePoint Server Standard Collection feature must be enabled before the Community Site template appears among the available site templates, even if the template has been made available through the Page Layouts And Site Templates options under Look And Feel in Site Settings. By default, this feature isn’t turned on.
Enabling the Community Sites feature creates lists, creates pages, and shows Web Parts that work with the community features:
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■ Discussions list ■
■ Badges list, which contains the badges available for contributing members ■
■ Community Members list ■
■ Categories list ■
■ Administration settings page ■ ■ Categories page ■ ■ Members page ■ ■ About page ■
■ Community Home page ■
■ What’s Happening Web Part, which displays the number of members, discussions, and
replies
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■ Top Contributors Web Part, which displays the members who contribute the most to
the community site
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■ My Membership Web Part, which displays an individual’s contributions to the commu-
nity site
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■ Manage Web Part, which allows moderators and site owners the ability to change set-
tings to the community site, such as how many points posts are worth
These items are available if the feature is turned on at the site level of an existing site or if a new site is created with the Community Site template. A community site has all the func- tionality of a normal SharePoint 2013 site, such as document management, versioning, per- missions, auditing, and so on. The preceding items allow for an interactive forum experience, but some dependencies exist for an even more enhanced experience. The optional service applications of the SharePoint 2013 farm that provide additional functionality are as follows:
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■ User Profile service application This allows for a tie-in to users’ newsfeeds and
allows for mentions (an @ sign followed by a person’s name). A user following another user can see whenever that followed user goes up in reputation, posts a discussion item, gets a like, or gets a reply marked as a best reply. When implemented in the same environment as My Sites, a community site can be accessed on the Sites page.
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■ Metadata service application This allows for hash tags to be used (an # sign fol-
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■ Search service application This isn’t necessary but is required if searching of the
community site is needed.
EXAM TIP
the exam isn’t just a simple multiple-choice test that has been the hallmark of many past exams. It poses several questions that require placing steps in the correct order that they should occur. For example, enabling the Metadata service application is necessary before you can use hash tags.
The types of members for a site can be broken down into four different types: owner, moderator, contributor, and visitor. Typically, forums are open for contributions from all members, but in some situations only a certain group of users can contribute to a forum but a larger audience can view the contributions. A specialized help desk might be an example of this, where only members of the technology team can contribute.
Moderators are the key set of users in a community site. They serve as the site’s shepherds. They can create and delete categories, edit and delete posts, mark replies as “best replies,” and configure reputation settings. They are also responsible for monitoring content, if that is enabled. (Of course, they can manually monitor it, but allowing the community to report offensive content is much more effective.) To enable monitoring of offensive content, follow these steps:
1. On the home page of the community site, click Community Settings in the Community Tools section of the page (assuming that you are a moderator or owner).
2. Select Enable Reporting Of Offensive Content (see Figure 2-2).
FIGURE 2-2 Enabling the reporting of offensive content
3. Click OK to continue and save settings.
Now, all moderators receive email when a user identifies a post or reply as offensive. Having users report offensive content is considered a best practice because it minimizes the amount of time moderators have to keep an eye on the content.
NOTE OUTGOING EMAIL SETTINGS
Outgoing email settings must be enabled in Central Administration for the moderator to receive emails about offensive content.
On the same page as Enable Reporting Of Offensive Content is a setting called Established Date. This date is shown on the About Page and can be used for sites created before the Community Site template existed. With this setting, users can see how long content has been contributed.
Anyone who has created a blog site should be familiar with the categories, and the idea is the same with Community Sites. Part of the planning process should involve creating catego- ries appropriate for the site. Correct categories help visitors find the information quickly and efficiently.