Community setup guide for admins

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

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.

Create a forum user: Create a forum user to use to define memberships to a forum.
Create a permission: Create a permission to use to define a user's access to a forum and its content types.
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.
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.
Configure content types for a forum: Configure content types for a forum to define which types of content to use in a particular forum.
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
- Copy permissions from a forum to copy all permissions and content types from one forum to another.
- Copy permissions from a parent forum.
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.

Parent Topic:Configuring communities

Related topics

Community content types

Community feedback types

Community access types

Platform Analytics Solutions for Communities

Migrate Social Q&A data to Communities

View community logs

View community feedback and bookmarks tables

Create a case from a discussion

Enable knowledge harvesting