Community Sites in SharePoint 2013 – Part 3

Recap: You can read Part 1 & Part 2.

Community Site Planning (Phase 3)

Planning the solution Planning the solution architecture involves identifying
answers for the following:

• What type of community do you want?
• What is the primary language for the community?
• Where does the Community Site logically belong in the current or planned SharePoint
  environment?
• What services and service applications do you have or need that support community
  features and functionality?

Community Types

Type	Permission	Approval setting
Private community. Available to only specified members.	Share the site with only specific users or groups, and grant Member permissions to them so they can contribute.	Not applicable.
Closed community. Everyone can view the content of the site, but only members who have approved requests for membership can contribute.	Share the site with Everyone and grant Visitor permissions to them so that they can view the site and request access.	Enable access requests on the site.
Open community with explicit membership. Everyone can view the site and can automatically join to contribute to the site.	Share the site with Everyone and grant Visitor permissions so they can view the site and automatically join as members.	Enable auto-approval on the site.
Open community. Everyone can contribute to the community.	Share the site with Everyone and grant Member permissions so they can all contribute.	Not applicable.

Language

• Generally used single language (so users can understand discussions)
• Multilanguage support can be enabled.
• Replies or Posts can be created in any language.

Logical Architecture   Based on the identified business needs, determine
where the community logically belongs in your SharePoint environment. For example,
if the business need is to enable large-scale participation among employees across
the company or a region, the community might logically belong with the company portal
or another similar high-level area in the SharePoint environment. However, if the
goal is to enable participation among a smaller group of employees, such as a division
or business unit, the community might logically belong with a divisional portal
or similar level in the SharePoint environment. Or you might have a farm specifically
for content or collaboration sites where you decide all of your Community Sites
belong.

• Enterprise Community Site & Communities Portal
• Divisional Community Site & Communities Portal
• Smaller Business Unit level Community Site

OR

• Dedicated Farm specifically for Collaboration sites

Services & Service Applications

• User Profile Service
• Management Metadata Service
• Search Service

User Profile service
Consider using the User Profile service to
integrate communities with My Sites. The User Profile service and service application
store information about users, such as profile pictures, organizational details,
and activities. This is a required service for My Sites and it is one of the key
services for the social computing experience in SharePoint Server 2013. Community
Sites benefit from feed integration and a Community Portal when you implement them
with the User profile service and the My Site Host site template. When community
members mention other members or use hash tags in their discussion posts and replies,
SharePoint Server updates users’ feeds with these activities. On users’ My Sites,
users who follow those mentioned people or hash tags see these activities in their
feed. This can help users discover communities of interest, other people to follow,
and information about things they are interested in. Additionally, members can click
mentioned members to navigate to a member’s profile on their My Site. When implemented
in the same environment as My Sites, users can access the Community Portal from
the Sites page on their My Sites. Additionally, when a member joins a community,
starts a discussion, has a post liked or marked as a best reply, or increases the
reputation level, a notification is posted to the feeds and is displayed for users
who are following that user on their My Sites.

Managed metadata
Consider using the Managed metadata service to enable hash tags in Community Sites.
When members include hash tags in discussion posts and replies, they can select
tags from the term store from the Managed metadata service. Additionally, when a
term does not already exist in the term store, members can create new tags and add
them to the term store. This helps to seed the Community Site with the corporate
taxonomy for tagging and enable growth of the term store through member contributions.

Search service
SharePoint Search is an important part of the SharePoint
user experience, including the experience with Community Sites and Community Portals.
Search enables users to search within discussions and find information in a Community
Site. It also populates the search-driven Community Portal page with sites that
use the Community Site template. Search performs the security trimming for the results
that display both in community searches and the communities that appear on the Community
Portal. The Community Portal is a page that users can browse and search to discover
communities of interest. This portal provides integration between users’ My Sites
and Community Sites. The My Site contains a link to the Community Portal so that
users can easily navigate to the portal.

Site Ownership & Moderation Roles

• Identify them & assign appropriate permissions
• Moderators will keep the community ‘Active & Healthy’.
• Moderator should configure reasonable reputation settings prior to start community.
• Designate Category owners based on members size.
• Determine the rules of participation and consequences when rules are broken.
• Export discussions to Excel (using manage discussion view) for better monitoring.

SharePoint will not recalculate reputation if , reputation model is changed while
users already earned reputation points. However new users will have accurate results.
Moderator can setup alerts for category owners or adding them to moderators group.
Determine the rules of participation and consequences when rules are broken. Most
communities are fairly self-governing, but the moderator role should have clear
guidelines from the business about how to handle issues and guidance from the IT
staff on how to implement those consequences in the technology itself. Export: This
way, they can easily determine how many posts are unanswered, have replies, and
so on. This data can help moderators and site owners to address issues in the community
if it is necessary, and understand where they should intervene, such as encouraging
participation and moving discussions to more appropriate categories. Just as with
other SharePoint lists, moderators and site owners can edit or create a specific
view of the discussion list to make sure that the data that they need for review
is included during export.

Community Site Creation & Configuration

• Community Site can be created using ‘Community Site’ template from Collaboration
  Tab.
• Community Portal can be created using ‘Community Portal’ template from Enterprise
  Tab.
• Farm Administrator privileges are required to create.
• Additional Steps:
  • Create as many Community Sites as you want.
  • Configure permissions for each community
  • Customize the Site as needed.
  • Run Search Crawler

Run a search crawl so that it indexes the new site or sites, and populates the Community
Portal with Community Sites. No communities appear on the portal until you run a
crawl. Configure the incremental crawl schedule so that the Community Portal continues
to display any new Community Sites, and so that members can search within communities
and the portal.

Community Site Requirements & Dependencies

Item	Required / Optional	Description
Content DB	Required	To store the content from the site’s lists and pages.
User Profile service, service application, and social and profile databases	Optional	Will notify the users who are following some one, when new post is created or any relevant event occurred.
Managed Metadata service, service application, and database	Optional	To enable hash tags and integration with feeds
Search service, service application, and databases	Optional	To enable users to search communities and discussions, and to populate the Community Portal.

Community Site Permissions

The default groups and permission levels should be sufficient for most communities,
but as with other SharePoint sites, you can create additional groups and configure
unique permission levels to suit the needs of your community. When you create your
site collection and select the Community Site template, you must specify a primary
owner, and optionally a secondary owner. These users belong to the Owners
group for the Community Site and have permission to add users to groups. As part
of your governance plan, work with the owners to understand the groups and permission
levels for the site.

SharePoint Group	Permission Level	Description
Members	Contribute	Members can view, add, update, and delete lists and documents. Exceptions: Members can only read the Categories and Members list items, and the site pages
Moderators	Moderate	Moderators can view, add, update, delete, and moderate list items and documents.
Owners	Full Control	Owners have full control of the site.
Visitors	Read	Visitors can view pages and list items, and download documents.