Community setup guide for admins

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Community Setup Guide for Admins

    This guide provides a comprehensive framework for ServiceNow administrators to establish community forums, enabling users to create and share content effectively. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration with stakeholders to define community requirements before implementation.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Stakeholder Roles: Identify key roles such as forum administrators and community administrators, who will oversee operational processes and configure settings respectively.
    • Requirements Gathering: Collaborate with stakeholders to define essential elements such as user roles, content types, forum names, moderation strategies, and notification settings.
    • Community Configuration Steps:
      • Create forum users and permissions to manage access.
      • Establish forums for content sharing and allow user requests for access.
      • Define content types and configure permissions for each forum.
      • Encourage user engagement by inviting members and managing permissions.
    • Guided Setup: Utilize the Communities guided setup feature in ServiceNow for a structured approach to configuration.

    Key Outcomes

    By following this guide, ServiceNow customers can expect to:

    • Establish a well-structured community forum that fosters user interaction and content creation.
    • Enhance content management through defined permissions and moderation strategies.
    • Utilize guided setup for efficient community configuration, ensuring a seamless implementation process.

    Overall, this guide equips administrators with the necessary steps and considerations to build an effective community within ServiceNow, enhancing collaboration and user engagement.

    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.