Setup of Community Roles and Groups

[Maik Skoddow]

This Community is built on the ServiceNow product of the same name and is part of larger packages such as CSM or HR. When setting up a community at the customer instance, you will be confronted with lots of roles and features in that context. For this reason, in one of my recent customer projects, I ran an extensive analysis to determine a minimum number of groups to put users with administrative or moderating activities into one of the identified groups. This article represents the final result and proposes an approach for the aggregation of administrative roles into groups. This way, it is easier to map your ServiceNow licenses.  Please note: Only roles that consume a license are considered in the following article!

Table of Contents Personas Capabilities Mapping of Personas & Roles to Groups Mapping of Groups to Licenses

Personas

For the sake of simplification, the following personas are introduced and mapped to the respective ServiceNow roles.

Persona	Corresponding ServiceNow Role	Description
Community Administrator	sn_communities.admin	Administer and manage all sections in the community.
Community Moderator	sn_communities.community_moderator	Moderate content associated with the community.
Moderation Administrator	sn_communities.moderation_admin	Administer moderation settings and moderate content associated forums.
Gamification Administrator	sn_gamification.admin	Can administer the gamification setting and configure the different rules related to gamification.
Gamification Moderator	sn_gamification.moderator	This role Verifies/Reviews points received by various profiles, as well as have the ability to edit these Points for the Users.
Forum Administrator	sn_communities.forum_admin	Administer and manage forum permissions content types, and topics associated to the forum.
Forum Moderator	sn_communities.forum_moderator	Moderate content within specified forums.
Knowledge Harvester	sn_communities.knowledge_harvester	Harvest knowledge from a community and create structured knowledge articles from unstructured discussions around a question. Note: You have to Enable Knowledge Harvesting before you can use that feature

Capabilities

The following tables list all community-related tasks and features and map them to the respective personas (roles).

Community Administration

	Community Admin	Moderation Admin	Community Moderator	Gamification Admin	Gamification Moderator	Forum Admin	Forum Moderator	Knowledge Harvester
Configure community content types
Configure video sources
Create topics
Disable topics
Create a permission
Configure the community profile
Create community Terms and Conditions
Create a forum
Modify SEO in community pages
View community logs
Enable Knowledge Harvesting

Overall Actions

	Community Admin	Moderation Admin	Community Moderator	Gamification Admin	Gamification Moderator	Forum Admin	Forum Moderator	Knowledge Harvester
Make announcements
Add featured content
Move forum content
Email a community user
Harvest Knowledge

Forums

	Community Admin	Moderation Admin	Community Moderator	Gamification Admin	Gamification Moderator	Forum Admin	Forum Moderator	Knowledge Harvester
Create a sub forum
Configure content types for a forum
Invite users to become members of a forum
Approve forum memberships
Add a topic to a forum
Create a forum user and add members
Create a forum permission
Clone a forum permission
Add access types to a forum permission
Add content types to a forum permission
Create a permission exception

Moderation

	Community Admin	Moderation Admin	Community Moderator	Gamification Admin	Gamification Moderator	Forum Admin	Forum Moderator	Knowledge Harvester
Configure general moderation settings
Configure moderation settings for a new user
Configure abuse reporting
Configure user banning
Configure moderation filters
Ban a user
Revoke a user ban
Approve or reject content
Disable Comments
Remove Content

Gamification

	Community Admin	Moderation Admin	Community Moderator	Gamification Admin	Gamification Moderator	Forum Admin	Forum Moderator	Knowledge Harvester
Configure gamification properties
Create a gamification rule
Create a gamification track
Create a gamification badge
Manage gamification levels
Manage gamification level ranges
Award or remove points for a community user
Award a badge to a user
Remove a badge from a user

Mapping of Personas & Roles to Groups

Based on the previous tables, it has proven practical to establish the following two groups and assign to them the given roles.

Group	Persona	Roles
Community Administrators	Community Administrator Community Moderator Moderation Administrator Gamification Administrator Gamification Moderator Knowledge Harvester	sn_communities.admin sn_communities.community_moderator sn_communities.moderation_admin sn_gamification.admin sn_gamification.moderator sn_communities.knowledge_harvester
Forum Administrator	Forum Administrator Forum Moderator Knowledge Harvester	sn_communities.forum_admin sn_communities.forum_moderator sn_communities.knowledge_harvester

Mapping of Groups to Licenses

Starting with Quebec Subscription Management is now based on common user groups (See Configuring Subscription Management with Groups). 

With the two proposed user groups, the efforts for managing the licenses reduces to initially configuring these  groups at the subscription module.

[Novira Sundberg]

Hi Maik,

This is insightful.

Correct me if I am wrong. 

From what I can see in your article instead of assigning community roles to a group that then becomes member of a Forum User. 

Do you assign role directly to user and categorized their access and rights via personas?

Isn't it best practice is to assign role via a group?

If a group contains different Personas that contains several roles, why do you create different personas if member of the groups are same users that has all the roles. 

Thanks. 

Novira

[Maik Skoddow]

Hi @Novira Sundberg 

thank you for your questions I will try to answer.

First please see that article as a kind of concept with the goal to find the best approach of mapping users with administrative tasks to groups, roles and licenses.

The personas are just synonyms for roles in the context of communities. With a customer, it is easier to talk about personas than roles like "sn_communities.moderation_admin".

At the end, with the proposed mapping of roles to groups, the personas do not play any role anymore.

As a final result of my previous considerations, only two groups with the corresponding roles (aka personas) remain, that you need to know in order to provide a new user with administrative tasks in the community context with the appropriate rights.

And the groups are so important because they are the connector to license management.

Makes that sense?

Kind regards
Maik

[Novira Sundberg]

Ah I see, 

The article is intended for ServiceNow Customer, not directly developer / implementer. "Personas" (general personas not Community personas) is used instead of roles to explain their differences. 

From developer/implementer perspective, Forum user is required to define access to a community forum. Forum user consists of users and/or user groups. 

How do you add member for internal Forum User? Do you add the user manually or create an internal user groups to be part of a Forum User?

Or the article is considering Forum User group is taken from existing group in sys_user_group?

Thank you. 

Novira

[Aditya Raute]

Hi Maik,

I was wondering if the 'Approve or Reject Content' permission can be used to moderate content before  it is posted on a forum. Is there any way to do this?

Thanks.