Community setup guide for admins

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Community setup guide for admins

    This guide helps ServiceNow administrators define requirements and configure forums to enable community users to create and share content effectively. It is designed for roles withsncommunities.adminorsncommunities.forumadminpermissions and emphasizes collaboration with stakeholders to establish community objectives and forum structures.

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    Key steps and stakeholder involvement

    • Stakeholder roles: Forum administrators manage daily forum operations like topic creation and moderation; community administrators handle advanced settings; community users contribute content such as questions, answers, blogs, and comments.
    • Requirement definition: Collaborate with stakeholders to determine content consumers, content types allowed, contributor roles, forum and topic names, banned keywords, moderation policies, and default user notifications.

    Practical forum setup actions

    • Create forum users and permissions: Establish forum users to assign memberships and create permissions that define users’ access levels to forums and content types.
    • Configure forums and content types: Set up forums to host user content, enable registered user access requests, and specify which content types are allowed per forum.
    • Manage permissions: Assign permissions to forum users, create exceptions for specific user needs, and copy permissions between forums to streamline management.
    • User engagement: Invite users to join forums to promote community participation.
    • Debugging: Use debugging tools to resolve access or permission issues affecting users.

    Next steps for community management

    • Create topics within forums to organize user-generated content around relevant themes.
    • Moderate the community by setting up rules and mechanisms for content and user moderation, ensuring a healthy community environment.

    Using guided setup

    ServiceNow provides a Communities guided setup tool accessible via Community > Administration > Guided Setup, which offers a structured sequence of tasks to simplify and streamline the configuration of Communities. This tool is recommended for admins to efficiently implement community features in their instance.

    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.