Communities

An invitation to join a forum is sent as an email message. The method that you use to accept an invitation depends on whether you are a registered community user.

Access types are used to control access to a forum or a content type.

Activate the Customer Communities plugin to use the Communities application.

Define which types of content to use in a particular forum and associate a workflow so that content is reviewed before becoming visible to other community users.

Content types for a permission determine the access that users have to certain content in a forum.

Add members to a forum user. Members can be individual users or user groups.

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

You can create forum users, which you then use to define memberships to a forum.

Manage forum membership approvals when registered community users request membership to a forum.

Approve or reject content that a user reported as inappropriate or that is associated with a particular community profile.

Change the assignment group to assign a moderation task to your assignment group.

You can ban a user from creating or editing content, for example, a user can be banned for posting inappropriate content.

Revoke a user ban to allow a user to create and edit content again.

You can bookmark your favorite questions, blogs, videos, documents, and events. You cannot bookmark content in draft state or replies or comments.

There are seven supported content types: Answer, Blog, Comment, Document, Event, Question, and Video.

Your community activity usually begins on the community homepage. If you are a logged in user, you see different information than non-logged in users. Your organization can customize the homepage.

Using subscriptions, you can choose specific areas of interest. Your activity feed and notifications are personalized according to your subscriptions.

In order to engage your internal experts to reply to discussion threads, you can create cases directly from community questions.

Configure parameters for the case generated from the community discussion so that it can be routed accordingly.

View questions that can potentially be converted to cases, the community portal provides a page with a list of questions created by contacts or consumers.

Clone a permission if an existing permission record cannot be modified and you require a permission record with similar settings.

Comment on a blog or a video or comment on another comment.

Reference topics provide additional information about communities.

This Platform Analytics Solution contains preconfigured dashboards. These dashboards contain actionable data visualizations that help you improve your business processes and practices.

The Communities dashboard displays up-to-date status on community usage, membership, content type and activity, and trends by forum, topic, and admin.

Users with the gamification administrator role can create the rules and other entities that award points to users based on their participation within the community.

Monitor points earned by users and award points and badges to users based on their participation within the community.

Gamification information appears on leaderboards, the user profile page, and content pages.

Encourage users to participate and contribute content in the community by providing incentives in the form of points, achievement levels, and badges.

Configure knowledge harvesting from a community to convert unstructured conversations to structured knowledge articles and make the information more accessible.

Community and forum administrators can give users and groups of users different levels of access to forums and forum content.

Community administrators can use properties to configure Communities behavior.

Ensure that users can perform all necessary actions by assigning roles.

To improve search results for community members using external search engines, the Communities application generates SEO meta tags and injects the tags into questions, topics, forums, and other page types.

Create, manage, and participate in events to encourage engagement across the community.

Your community activity usually begins on the Community homepage. If you are a non-logged in user, you see different information than logged in users. Your organization can customize the homepage.

The community profile displays an overview of a user's personal information as well as their contributions, network, achievements, expertise, and events they are attending. You can view and edit your own profile. You can also view another user's profile and perform actions, such as following them or reporting inappropriate content.

The Community Service Portal is a web interface that is based on the ServiceNow Service Portal application.

Configure whether users can report content and profile abuse, set an abuse reporting threshold, and define reasons for abuse reporting.

Set the number of offenses a user can make before they are banned from creating or editing content.

Configure the publishing interval to ensure blogs are published closer to the scheduled time.

Configure various aspects of Communities based on the specific requirements of your organization.

Set up the community profile by configuring profile fields and deciding which fields to display in the personal information section of the community profile.

A forum is a place for users to share content, exchange notes, ask and answer questions, and so on. Before community users can contribute content, configure a forum with content types and permissions, and create and add topics to one or more forums.

Configure when to moderate content for users and user groups.

Create moderation filters to manage how content is moderated.

Configure which fields appear in the community profile and manage the settings associated with those fields.

Once users have accessed public forums and decided they want to join the community, they can self-register to the community. External user registration provides a way of validating users and requires them to accept the community Terms and Conditions.

Configure Community Service Portal header menus to create a consistent user experience across all your end-user facing service portals using a modern interface and a unified navigation menu structure.

You can copy all permissions and content types from one forum to another.

You can copy permissions from a parent forum to a child forum.

Create a blog post and publish it immediately, schedule to publish at a specified date, or save it as a draft.

If you have the proper permissions in a forum, you can share a document with colleagues, experts, or other community users. You can associate the document with as many topics as needed.

You can create a community event that other community users, colleagues, or experts can register for and attend.

Add a forum user and a permission to a forum to create a forum permission.

Create a forum to provide a place for users to share content. You can configure forums for membership that registered community users request access to join. You can also configure forums to convert unstructured conversations to structured knowledge articles.

Harvest knowledge from a community and create structured knowledge articles from unstructured discussions around a question.

Create a persona and associate it to a role to manage which data users can modify.

Create a permission to use to define a user's access to a forum and the content in the forum.

Create a field to display on the community profile.

Ask a question in a forum to get an answer from other community users.

Create a sub forum and map it to a parent forum to establish a forum hierarchy.

Community members must follow the community rules of conduct. Create community Terms and Conditions and them share to build a successful community. Every community user must review and accept the Terms and Conditions before contributing to a community.

Create a topic for users to create and share content.

Configure additional sources that can be used for uploading a video to the community.

Post a video in a forum or sub forum.

Customize community service portal according to your needs.

Change your community profile photo and edit your personal information.

Investigate and diagnose problems with user access to forums.

Access types for a permission determine the access that users have to certain forums.

Configure the system to prevent inappropriate user contributions.

Disable comments on a blog, document, video, event, or question to avoid users from posting comments.

Disable the topics feature so that no topic information is visible in your community.

Domain separation is unsupported in Communities. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

Edit the details of past and upcoming events. By editing a past event, you can attach a document or share the meeting recording link with your event subscribers.

Configure content types, such as videos and blogs, for the community.

Explore foundational concepts for Communities. For setup tasks, see Configuring communities. For end-user guidance, see Using communities.

Add or edit featured content in a community to appear in the Featured Content section on the community homepage, forum homepage, or both.

There are two supported feedback types: Upvote and Helpful.

Manage your network by following other community users and tracking their activity in the community.

Set fields on the form to create new forum or sub forum.

While in a forum, you can navigate the forum homepage and perform tasks, such as posting content.

Award gamification badges to community users to recognize their community activities.

Award points to a user to recognize their contributions to the community. Remove points for a user if you observe that they are cheating the gamification system.

Users can earn badges for achievements or areas of expertise within the community. Gamification moderators manually assign badges to users.

Points accumulated by community users can help them achieve different reputation levels.

Community users receive notifications about badge assignments and levels achieved through the activity feed.

Users earn gamification points by performing activities in the community.

Gamification rules allow you to configure points that users receive for activities on the community.

Tracks provide a way to logically separate points assigned in the communities into different areas.

The gamification feature includes several components, such as rules, levels, and tracks, that enable users to earn points and badges for community activities.

Configure gamification properties to meet your company's needs.

Create gamification badges that users can earn for achievements within the community.

Manage the predefined levels for global, forum, and topic expertise.

Manage level ranges for a gamification level definition, to recognize the expertise level of your community users.

Create gamification rules so that users can earn points for community activities.

Create tracks to provide a logical way to separate points assigned in the communities into different areas.

Remove a gamification badge from a community user if it is no longer relevant for that user.

The user's gamification level and badges are displayed on the content pages, so that other community users can view the reputation of the content contributor.

In order to be transparent to your users about gamification rules, you can share the points received for community activities.

Leaderboard widgets appear on the Community homepage and on forum and topic landing pages. These widgets display the users with the highest point totals within the community, forum, or topic.

The leaderboard page displays the top contributors in the community, in a forum, or in a topic.

The user profile page displays gamification information that showcases the user's expertise.

Invite users to become members of a particular forum to encourage greater community involvement.

Global announcements appear in the banner and broadcast messages to all community members. Forum announcements appear in the Announcements section on the forum page. You can also send the announcement by email.

View additional response information on the event, edit or delete events, and download a guest list.

Create a permission exception for users who require specific permissions for a forum.

Set notification preferences to receive updates via email on the content that you are following.

Edit your display settings to determine who can view each profile section.

Draw attention to your content in the community by mentioning other community users in the post.

If you want to migrate existing Social Q&A content to Communities, you can use a script to migrate the data.

Community moderators can manage content quality by reducing the inappropriate content that is posted on the community.

Move community content posts from one forum to another.

The activity feed provides a central place for community users to view information and interact. It lists the most recent activity in the community based on your network, posts, and subscriptions. You can reply, comment, and give feedback directly from the activity feed.

You can view details for published events and perform tasks such as responding to the event or adding it to your calendar.

Post and respond to content in the community to get answers or share information.

Send a private message to a community user directly from the community.

Provide feedback on content that you find useful.

Validate that Communities still work after you make any configuration change, such as apply an upgrade or develop an application. Copy and customize these quick start tests to pass when using your instance-specific data.

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

Refine your search results to narrow down the content displayed.

Once you have accessed a public forum and decided to join the community, you can self-register by signing up and accepting the community Terms and Conditions.

Remove content that does not meet community standards.

Reply to a question or another reply.

Report content to alert community moderators that the content is inappropriate or spam.

Report a community profile to alert community moderators that there is offensive or inaccurate information in the profile.

You must be a registered member of the community to request membership to a forum that is marked for membership only.

Enter a keyword to use the type-ahead search on the Community homepage or enter one or more words to view all search results.

If an auto-generated SEO meta tag does not meet your needs, you can modify or replace the tag.

With the ServiceNow Communities application, connect, engage, and collaborate with your employees, customers, partners, and prospects. Your users get quick responses to their issues by posting questions, reviewing blogs or videos, and searching for previous discussions. It is an essential component of your self-service strategy along with Knowledge Base and Service Catalog.

Sort your community search results to narrow down the content displayed.

Subscribe to forums, topics, questions, blogs, and videos. You are automatically subscribed to content that you create.

Set fields on the form to create a new topic.

Participate in your community by sharing content, asking and answering questions, creating events, giving feedback, and so on.

Set fields on the form to configure video sources.

The Communities dashboard displays up-to-date status on community usage, membership, content type and activity, and trends by forum and by topic.

Community logs display information about who has viewed or searched for content in a community. The list view displays all log entries, unless filtered.

The Events landing page provides an overview of all events that you have access to in the community. You can filter events, view your status for the event, see how many other community users are attending an event, and so on.

View feedback and bookmarks tables to view which community content was given feedback or was bookmarked.

View another user's community profile to see their contributions, network, expertise, and so on. You can also manage your network by following and unfollowing other community users.

View and edit your own community profile, which displays your contributions, network, achievements, expertise, and events you are attending.