Community setup guide for admins

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Community setup guide for admins

    This guide helps ServiceNow administrators set up and manage Communities and forums effectively, enabling users to contribute and interact with content. It outlines the necessary roles, stakeholder responsibilities, and step-by-step instructions for establishing a collaborative space where community users can create and share content.

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    Stakeholders and Roles

    • Forum administrators: Manage daily forum operations including topic creation, user management, and moderation.
    • Community administrators: Configure advanced Community settings and features.
    • Community users: Create and contribute content such as questions, answers, blogs, and comments.

    Key Setup Considerations

    Before configuring the community, administrators should collaborate with stakeholders to define:

    • Who the community content consumers are.
    • Which content types users can contribute.
    • Who has content creation versus read-only permissions.
    • Names for initial forums and topics.
    • Banned keywords and moderation policies.
    • Default notification settings for community activities.

    Community Setup Steps

    • Create a forum user: Establish a user to manage forum memberships.
    • Create permissions: Define user access levels to forums and content types.
    • Add access and content types to permissions: Specify what users can view or contribute.
    • Create forums: Set up forums as content sharing spaces and enable access requests.
    • Configure content types: Determine allowed content formats within each forum.
    • Create forum permissions: Assign users and permissions to forums.
    • Optional tasks include inviting users, creating permission exceptions, copying permissions between forums, and debugging user access issues.

    Next Steps

    • Create topics within forums to organize content contributions.
    • Set up moderation rules to manage content and user behavior effectively.
    • Use the Communities guided setup tool to streamline configuration by following a task sequence accessible via Community > Administration > Guided Setup.

    Additional Resources and Related Tasks

    The guide references related configuration areas such as community content types, feedback, access types, gamification, self-registration, and platform analytics. It also points to administrative tasks like migrating Social Q&A data, viewing community logs, and managing permissions to ensure comprehensive community management.

    Define your requirements with community and forum stakeholders and set up your forums for community users to start creating content.

    Requirements

    The roles required to define requirements and set up forums include sn_communities.admin or sn_communities.forum_admin.

    Before you begin

    Meet with the stakeholders
    Table 1. Stakeholder and responsibility
    Stakeholder Responsibilities
    Forum administrators Define and oversee the forum processes for day-to-day operations related to topic creation, user management, and moderation.
    Community administrators Configure advanced settings for Communities features.
    Community users Contribute content in the form of questions, answers, blogs, and comments.
    With stakeholders, determine your community requirements
    • Who are the consumers of the community content?
    • Which content types can users contribute?
    • Who can contribute content and who should have read-only access?
    • What should the names of the initial forums be?
    • Within these forums, what should the names of the initial topics be?
    • Which keywords should be banned?
    • How should the system moderate content and users?
    • What should the default notifications that users receive for various community activities be?

    What to do

    Use the following steps as guidance to setting up your community.
    1. Create a forum user: Create a forum user to use to define memberships to a forum.
    2. Create a permission: Create a permission to use to define a user's access to a forum and its content types.
    3. Add access and content types to your permission: Add access types to a permission to determine the access that users have to certain forums and content.
    4. Create a forum: Create a forum to provide a place for users to share content and configure the forum to allow registered users to request access to join.
    5. Configure content types for a forum: Configure content types for a forum to define which types of content to use in a particular forum.
    6. Create a forum permission: Create a forum permission by adding a forum user and a permission to a forum.

    If required, perform the following actions:

    Invite users to join the forum
    Invite users to become members of a forum to encourage greater community involvement.
    Create permission exceptions
    Create a permission exception for users who require specific permissions for a forum.
    Copy permissions
    Debug user permissions
    Debug user permissions to investigate and diagnose problems with user access to forums.

    Next steps

    Create a topic for users to create and share content.

    Add a topic to a forum so that users can associate content to that topic.

    Moderate a community to set up how the system moderates content and users.

    Using guided setup to implement Communities

    Communities guided setup provides a sequence of tasks that help you configure Communities on your ServiceNow instance. To open Communities guided setup, navigate to Community > Administration > Guided Setup.

    For more information about using the guided setup interface, see Using guided setup.