Community setup guide for admins

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Community setup guide for admins

    This guide assists ServiceNow administrators in defining requirements and setting up forums within Communities to enable users to create and share content effectively. It outlines the roles involved, stakeholder responsibilities, and key steps to configure a community environment that supports user engagement through forums, topics, and content moderation.

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    Key Roles and Responsibilities

    • Forum administrators: Manage day-to-day forum operations including topic creation, user management, and moderation.
    • Community administrators: Configure advanced community features and settings.
    • Community users: Contribute content such as questions, answers, blogs, and comments.

    Defining Community Requirements

    Engage stakeholders to clarify:

    • Who will consume community content
    • Types of content users can contribute
    • Contributor roles and read-only access
    • Names of initial forums and topics
    • Keywords to ban
    • Content and user moderation strategies
    • Default user notifications for community activities

    Forum Setup Process

    • Create a forum user: Define memberships for forums.
    • Create permissions: Establish user access levels and content type permissions for forums.
    • Add access and content types to permissions: Specify what users can access and contribute within forums.
    • Create and configure forums: Set up forums allowing registered users to request access and define allowable content types.
    • Create forum permissions: Link forum users and permissions to forums.
    • Optional advanced actions:
      • Invite users to join forums to boost engagement
      • Create permission exceptions for specific user needs
      • Copy permissions between forums, including from parent forums
      • Debug user permissions to resolve access issues

    Next Steps

    • Create topics within forums to organize user-generated content.
    • Moderate the community to manage content and user behavior effectively.

    Using Guided Setup

    For streamlined configuration, use the Communities guided setup available via Community > Administration > Guided Setup. This tool provides task sequences to help configure Communities on your ServiceNow instance efficiently.

    Define your requirements with community and forum stakeholders and set up your forums for community users to start creating content.

    Requirements

    The roles required to define requirements and set up forums include sn_communities.admin or sn_communities.forum_admin.

    Before you begin

    Meet with the stakeholders
    Table 1. Stakeholder and responsibility
    Stakeholder Responsibilities
    Forum administrators Define and oversee the forum processes for day-to-day operations related to topic creation, user management, and moderation.
    Community administrators Configure advanced settings for Communities features.
    Community users Contribute content in the form of questions, answers, blogs, and comments.
    With stakeholders, determine your community requirements
    • Who are the consumers of the community content?
    • Which content types can users contribute?
    • Who can contribute content and who should have read-only access?
    • What should the names of the initial forums be?
    • Within these forums, what should the names of the initial topics be?
    • Which keywords should be banned?
    • How should the system moderate content and users?
    • What should the default notifications that users receive for various community activities be?

    What to do

    Use the following steps as guidance to setting up your community.
    1. Create a forum user: Create a forum user to use to define memberships to a forum.
    2. Create a permission: Create a permission to use to define a user's access to a forum and its content types.
    3. Add access and content types to your permission: Add access types to a permission to determine the access that users have to certain forums and content.
    4. Create a forum: Create a forum to provide a place for users to share content and configure the forum to allow registered users to request access to join.
    5. Configure content types for a forum: Configure content types for a forum to define which types of content to use in a particular forum.
    6. Create a forum permission: Create a forum permission by adding a forum user and a permission to a forum.

    If required, perform the following actions:

    Invite users to join the forum
    Invite users to become members of a forum to encourage greater community involvement.
    Create permission exceptions
    Create a permission exception for users who require specific permissions for a forum.
    Copy permissions
    Debug user permissions
    Debug user permissions to investigate and diagnose problems with user access to forums.

    Next steps

    Create a topic for users to create and share content.

    Add a topic to a forum so that users can associate content to that topic.

    Moderate a community to set up how the system moderates content and users.

    Using guided setup to implement Communities

    Communities guided setup provides a sequence of tasks that help you configure Communities on your ServiceNow instance. To open Communities guided setup, navigate to Community > Administration > Guided Setup.

    For more information about using the guided setup interface, see Using guided setup.