Community Site Template

[Graham McHugh]

Hi All,

We have a need for an out of the box forum/community solution in SharePoint Online -- it's looking like the Community template is the best option. Is anyone using it successfully? It feels pretty old-timey, but maybe still functional?

Teams would be a consideration, but the limit to the number of users makes it unusable for this particular forum/community need. Yammer is not an option.

I wish we had an OOTB template like techcommunity, or answers.microsoft.com -- maybe one day...

Thanks in advance!

[#2]

Well, the community template is a classic one and since Yammer is not an option, it seems you are limited to that template that in my opinion is not very useful nowadays

[#3]

It's looking that way. The community template could be workable for computer/tablet users, but pretty much unusable from a smartphone.

[#4]

Correct, classic SharePoint sites are not mobile friendly by definition

[#5]

I would check this app from Lightning tools

https://lightningtools.com/products/social-squared-client-side-web-part/

[#6]

That looks like a decent product -- but we need an out of the box solution. Thanks anyway.

[#7]

Yammer is really the right answer for this problem, so if you are sure it is not available and you have to use the legacy Community Site template, check out this presentation before you go too far. The template has bugs that will never get fixed. There are work around a that I painfully discovered and documented several years ago when this template was first available. I really wish you didn’t have to use it, but if you do, at least understand what you are getting in to! https://www.slideshare.net/susanhanley/hanley-exploring-thecommunitysitesharepointintersection

[#8]

A lot of great information there -- thanks for sharing!

The two biggest issues I see with the community site template are the sharing and organizing of files being awkward, and the lack of mobile (modern) functionality -- the latter of which is pretty much a deal breaker.

I guess I'll keep looking for a better option.

Thanks all for the responses.