This article outlines FAQs around Employee Forums. Looking for more information on Employee Forums? See this blog post, as well as our Product Documentation.
What types of content can be posted on Employee Forums?
Questions, answers, blogs, comments, documents, events, and videos are all supported content types. Employee Forum administrators can configure which content types are available at large, and within specific forums.
What should be a Knowledge Article versus an Employee Forum post?
Generally speaking, Knowledge Articles are for sharing information that is matter-of-fact, and Employee Forum posts are for expressing opinions, sharing advice, and collaborating. Examples of content that should exist as a Knowledge Article include policies and how-to information, whereas examples of Employee Forum content could be a blog post from a leader, or a question on the best bike path near the office.
What should be a survey versus an Employee Forum?
Surveys typically give users the option to rate their satisfaction on case resolution, can be conditional, and are generally associated with metrics and scorecards. Employee Forums, however, are meant to capture feedback that is more organic in nature.
How are employee forums managed?
Out-of-the-box, there are over 20 permission levels that can be granted to different users in your organization, with the option to add new permissions as needed. Permission levels range from read-only options, to full read and write capability.
How can Employee Forums be moderated?
Moderators can:
• Ban keywords
• Ban users
• Require content approval for all first-time posters, or a specific user or group
• Enable users to report inappropriate content (if reported, a task is assigned to the moderator to either approve or reject the reported item)
What roles are needed to support and moderate Employee Forums?
To configure Employee Forums, users must have the sn_communities.admin or sn_communities.forum_admin roles. To moderate and approve and/or reject content, users must have the sn_communities.community_moderator or sn_communities.moderation_admin roles.
How do Employee Forums surface on the Employee Service Center?
By default, Employee Forums are accessible via the top navigation on the Employee Service Center. You may also configure forum tiles to appear on the Employee Service Center homepage.
How do I get started?
First, you’ll want to identify your requirements. Below are some questions to consider:
• What forums would you like to present to users?
• What will the Terms & Conditions be?
• Which permission levels should be granted to which users? Should it vary by persona? For example, will employees have full read and write capabilities across all content types except blogs, which are limited to HR Leaders and Executives?
• What keywords should be banned? What other moderation would you like to enforce?
You’ll also want to activate the com.sn_customer_communities plug-in within a development environment so configurations can begin.
Hi Tiffany,
This sounds like a neat use case!
Outside of the delivered Blog Title, Forum, Topic(s), and Description fields, there isn’t currently a quick way to configure additional fields that need to be populated. However, there could be a few ways to meet your requirement:
- Could Time Commitment and Required Skills become standardized enough to exist as “Topics”? Users could then select these as they’re writing blogs, and other users reading the blog would see it like this:
A benefit to this approach is that users can subscribe to Topics, so this could be especially helpful if people subscribed to Topics that align with their personal skills.
- Do the users who’d post to the Opportunities Board have a Knowledge role that allows them to contribute articles to a KB? Your requirement reminds me of what is possible with knowledge article templates. You could configure a new knowledge article template to collect Time Commitment and Required Skills, and you could link to this article within the Blog
- You could also explore adding fields to the Blog [sn_communities_blog] table, although this would likely involve customization (i.e. modifying of the widgets that display the blog form to users on the Employee Service Center).
