SharePoint 2013 Community Site Creation Best Practices

Posted by Sophina Dillard on Tuesday, 12 November 2013 0

We all agree that Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is awesome and it is offering all these new features to developers and enterprises. A particular feature which everybody is really excited about is “Community Sites”.

What is Community site?

With this feature the user can create communities to discuss anything related to SharePoint 2013 or otherwise. The user can also invite other people to be a part of this community. There is a point as well as badges system for the users who reply and post on the threads. The user can configure this feature only on the live site.

Some of the best practices which the user must adopt while creating a community sites are-

The more the merrier

It is no point to have a community which has 20-30 members because then the discussion would not have lots of comments and suggestions. It is advisable to have at least 150 active members before starting a community. The more members you have in your community the more active the topic of discussion will remain and everybody will get badges.

Position an arbitrator

A job of an arbitrator is very important in a community. Deploy a person who can review all the comments as well as discussion points so that the integrity of the community remains intact. This arbitrator is also responsible to invite more people and keep the conversation going.

Your site must be live

Do not add users and community members if your site is not live because it is likely that your members will not be able to get the confirmation e-mail and so forth. Make sure that your live is active and test it before sending invitation to all your community members.

Importance of content library

This whole world is going social. Now, the communities are not only needed for talking and sharing views. It’s also about sharing documents, posting your PPT’s on the relevant topic and much more. Hence, it is important to have a content library in your community to ease up your members with their documents.

Limited vs. unlimited access

It is not suggested to give unlimited access to all the community members. Like, giving an access of editing the document can lead to very big problem because then any member can change the document as per their own need and they can also change the document by mistake. As a rule, give access to edit the document only to the owner of the document or the arbitrator.

Status of your community

You can actually set the status of your community site. You can either keep it private, closed, by invitation only etc. It will serve the purpose of restricted entry to your community and you will be able to control all the members.

These all are just some of the amazing features of Microsoft SharePoint 2013, to explore all the features you must become member of a community today or better still create a community for yourself.