Community VS Forum VS customer portal

[BsydH]

Like the head, I would like know the difference between Community VS Forum VS customer portal.

Text doesn't have any explanation about it and I feel confused. Could somebody help me about this question?

Thank you.

[ifti122]

Hi @BsydH,

These 3 terms are for different purposes, here I tried to define them so that you can differentiate:

• ServiceNow Community is primarily an open, public platform where a global audience of ServiceNow users and experts can ask questions, share solutions, best practices, insights, and engage in discussions. It's a broad platform for knowledge sharing, blogs, and event updates, often managed externally to individual ServiceNow instances.
• Within a specific ServiceNow instance, a forum is designed for internal discussion and collaboration, typically among an organization's employees. It's used for focused, instance-specific discussions, threaded Q&A, and sharing knowledge relevant to that particular business, with access controlled by user roles and permissions.
• While Customer Portal is a customer-facing support portal for an organization's external customers. Its main purpose is to enable customers to submit and track support cases, view knowledge articles, access self-service resources, and manage service requests without direct interaction with service agents.

In short, a Community is a broad, public platform for global users, experts, and partners to share knowledge and engage in general discussions, a Forum is typically an internal, instance-specific platform for employees to discuss and collaborate on focused topics, and a Customer Portal is a customer-facing interface allowing external customers to self-serve, submit, and track support requests.

Hope now you have a clear idea regarding these three things.

Thanks & Regards,
Muhammad Iftikhar
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