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To get started we will need to provision a new site collection using the Team Site Template, activate the supporting features, and create a landing page to support our community.

In this case I have selected a Team Site Template because it is a good generic building block for sites like this, and it can also be used to create Web Templates that can be used to provision additional sites.

Permissions management is one of the things that is typically different when working with community sites. Where a traditional department site is tied to a specific department and likely has an Active Directory security group, the community site is meant to be cross-functional including people from throughout the organization. Making that collaboration easy, especially for new members, often means taking a completely different approach.

The approach that I typically take is to identify the top most Active Directory groups that apply and then grant them Contributor permission level. That could be something like<my domain>\domain users which is a standard security group that will include all domain users. Letting everyone contribute by default will make the site easier to maintain and also better support collaboration and innovation.

One way to profile community advocates and members from throughout the organization is to find a way to profile them. A great way to do this is to define a user profile property that can track the communities that the person is associated with. This one field can be used to support all of the communities throughout the organization so it should only be created once. The great thing about this property is that it can be used to help find people within the user profiles, but also it can be used to display the members within the community site itself. In this section, we will define the custom user profile property and then create a custom page that lists people associated with the community.

The social features included with SharePoint Server 2010 are intended to support collaboration and increase user engagement. Both the Note Board and Tag Cloud web parts are included to help support those social interactions.

It is important that we continue to try and find effective ways to surface content so that it is as easy as possible for users to find and use the content. To do that we are going to leverage two additional web parts available in SharePoint server that can assist here. The Web Analytics Web Part and the Content Query Web Part.

Using Wikis is a great way to collaborate on content within SharePoint. While most people still think in terms of documents, there are a number of advantages to using Wikis over individual documents. These advantages include the ability to link from one document to another easily, the ability to provide better change markup without the need to use Track Changes, and the ability to integrate other web parts or SharePoint content within the Wiki content.

The Enterprise Wikis introduced with SharePoint Server 2010 provides some much needed advances over the standard Wiki features. While the page editing and markup are the exact same, there are Page Layout changes that provided much better support especially for larger sets of content. The features include Page Ratings, Wiki Categories making it easier to tag and relate pages, and also Metadata Navigation.

This section will detail the recommended steps for configuring the Enterprise Wiki on our community site...

This section heavily leverages the out of the box web parts and features to assemble a rich and interactive community site.

The customizations are grouped as follows: