Overview of Community site template in SharePoint Online Office 365

This SharePoint Online tutorial we will discuss, how to create and use the community site template in SharePoint online Office 365. Community site is a new site template it provides a forum experience in SharePoint online. Use communities to categorize and cultivate discussions among a broad group of people across organizations in a company.

You can also activate community site features on existing sites without creating community site templates to access the features like Badges, Discussions, Community Members, Categories.

Let’s see How to create a community site in SharePoint online (Download PDF for FREE)

Open http://portal.office365.com. Logged in with your valid Office 365 tenant username and password.

Navigate to admin center -> Click SharePoint and Click New -> Private site collection.

Provide the SharePoint site title and web site address. Pick a site template -> Community site.

Click Ok

So community site has been successfully created with awesome community experience features
Lists: Categories, Community members, Discussion List, Site Pages

Categories:
Using this category list, we can define the categories for discussion for example Products, Clothing, Electronics like this kind of key terms.

Discussion List:
Using Discussion list, it holds the posts posted by the community members and likes, ratings and replies from other members inside the community,

Community Members:
This list may work as a database for holding all the community members information inside the community forum

Site Pages:
In this site template site pages were pretty different It holds the different pages by default here the list of pages Community home, About, Topic, Categories, Category, Members

– Community Home: It’s a default home page it holds all the discussions, Top members widget, Community tools it helps to create badges, assign badges, set reputation and more… will discuss after with detailed information

– About: This page provides the rules and regulations about the community rest of other components as same as the Home page

– Topic: This page is a separate page for discussion related information

– Categories: Using this page we can create and manage categories for discussions

– Members: It holds the members and top members information inside the community

Let’s Explain all the components:
Discussions inside the community based on categories:
Navigate to homepage -> Community tools -> Click create categories

Click Create categories
On the page Click New-> provide Category Name, Description and Image source

Am created “Electronics, mobiles, Clothes”

Now create discussion based on categories
Navigate to homepage -> click New Discussion

Click save

Now you can see this discussion was under category “Electronics”
Also, you guys can provide likes and reply comments your suggestion about the discussion.

Now you are able to see the member of community sites and his posts

Now let’s assign a badge for a community members
In community tools -> click Create badges

By default, you get Expert, Professional
Am going to Add “Member”

Let’s Assign a Badge to members
Click Assign badge to members
Click on -> moderation -> Give Badge

Assign Badge as “Professional”
Let’s see here.

Badge has been assigned to the community member
Open community tools -> Click Reputation settings

Here you can assign reputation points for creating and replying posts for likes and best replies
You can also achievement levels as points and images.

Click ok to complete the setup
Now open community tools -> Click Community settings

Enable auto approval for permission requests and reporting of offensive contents

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Am just check Enable auto approval and click ok. So as of now, you guys know about community sites and its default components and working cycle.