Chapter 4. Building an Engaging Community Site

Organizations today are looking for ways to increase collaboration and to provide more self-help resources through the use of tools like SharePoint. Thanks to the built-in Team Site template, it can be fairly easy to build a department-level collaboration site, but there is currently no template that is optimized for use as a true community collaboration site where the content is less structured, more conversational, and where the group will evolve over time, unlike your traditional department site.

This chapter will attempt to address the challenges of using a Team Site for community collaboration so that you can build a community site that can keep people engaged and incorporate the collaboration levels that everyone is looking for.

Community sites can be used to drive collaboration and self-help around a specific topic or system. Examples could include business topics like Lean, Six Sigma, or other process improvement methodologies, or for...