What is the difference between "Social Q&A" and "Communities"?

[Isaac Vicentini]

Hi!

I read in the documentation on these two topics, but I couldn't identify the main differences between them.
Could you please exemplify me? When should I use one or the other?

Thanks!

[rahulpandey]

Hi Isaac,

Social QA is an extension of Knowledge application. One can have a discussion about a knowledge base.

Communities is more like a forum, where you can have Q&A, discussion etc. This site is built on communities module.

[Jeff Currier]

To expand on this a bit.  Communities is part of Customer Service Management.  So only if you have CSM would you have communities.  Knowledge bases are used with many ServiceNow solutions including Employee and IT workflows.  Thus the Q&A as part of the knowledge base can be searched when entering or working on incidents and cases.

There cam be overlap between the two depending on how ServiceNow is deployed at your site.  I am not sure having both active makes sense.

[tsutherland · Accepted solution]

From the Paris documentation, Social Q&A is being deprecated.

• The Social Q&A feature is being deprecated. You can instead use Communities to connect, engage, collaborate, with employees, customers, partners, and prospects. As an existing customer upgrading to the Paris release, you can continue to use Social Q&A (if enabled) or migrate your existing social Q&A data to Communities. For more information, see Migrate Social Q&A data to Communities.

So in that regard, you may not want to start using Social Q&A.

[Chris D]

Granted, we don't use Social Q&A now - though I wish we did - but I don't see how Communities can replace the type of "crowdsourced knowledge" that SQA did. It seems like it just creates more overhead than necessary. For example, we have one primary IT knowledge base, so having SQA could have be an easy way for end users to just put (low priority) questions out there and get them answered and documented, even if informally. As far as "we don't know what we don't know", this is a great way I think to find out what needs to be documented in a natural, win-win kinda way. Communities - often being discussion based (not to mention being a completely different application) - just seem like overkill for this...