"Community Site Feature" - is it Modern?

[lindabusdiecker]

A customer wants the functionality in SharePoint Online that we got from enabling the SharePoint 2016 "Community Site Feature".

If I activate that via Site Features on a Modern site collection, am I being true to Modern, or am I pulling in classic functionality? If it's not Modern, how can I get the functionality in a Modern way?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@lindabusdiecker  there hasn't been any investment by Microsoft in the community sites features for quite a few years. My strong recommendation is to use a Yammer group where you can embed conversations in your SharePoint site, have a good modern mobile experience etc. And with the new Yammer coming shortly there'll be even more reasons to use it rather than the older community site.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#3]

@RobElliott - Thank you, I figured that might be the case!  Do you know of anywhere that spells out all of the sites features that are in the same boat? We want to be as Modern as we can, so don't want to enable site features that will be a detriment in the long run.

I also figured they'd want us to be using Teams, but my understanding is our policy will be to age conversations out pretty quickly.  We've used Yammer before, and were underwhelmed.  I listened to a podcast yesterday that talked about how little effort Microsoft had put into Yammer after they purchased it (in 2012?) and that it hadn't been incorporated into Microsoft 365, but that last year (?) Microsoft put someone new in charge of it who was really going to turn that around.

[#4]

I did find https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Discontinued-features-and-modified-functionality-in-Microso..., which says it also applied to SharePoint Online, but it does not go through all the features. I found the same to be true of the articles I found that introduce Modern. Thank you!

[#5]

@lindabusdiecker Yammer has moved on considerably over the last couple of Years and the new version I linked to in my previous post promises to be another big step forward. As Microsoft say about the new version: "Completely redesigned with new capabilities that power leadership engagement, company-wide communication, and communities that delivers a beautiful, intelligent experience for both web and mobile. Deeper integrations connect Yammer to Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Outlook, and, as part of Microsoft 365, people can engage and share knowledge across the organization with open conversation backed by enterprise-grade privacy, security and compliance."

In our company we have 30,000 staff on Yammer with a vast number of different Yammer groups. We use it as the outer ring of conversations across all the businesses in our company and, for example, it is used heavily for staff to find expertise and resources from across the whole company, to answer specific questions on our Office 365 apps, we have groups for our graduates and apprentices, different technical levels and so on where conversations go on all the time.

Teams sites are used for the inner ring of communications amongst smaller teams focussed on a specific project for sharing files amongst the team (who might not all be in the same business in our group). And now with private channels in Teams you can run up and close sub- projects and conversations very easily without needing to create a whole new team.

For overall communications I manage the Office 365 SharePoint intranet which is a communications hub site with lots of other modern sites associated to it to give a common menu structure, it allows news to flow up from the associated sites to the top-level intranet site( and other sites) as well as cascade down. You've got Yammer, Twitter, Forms, PowerApps and lots of other web parts and it all works together nicely and goes to make the modern SharePoint experience a real pleasure rather than previous versions like SharePoint 2010 which could be "difficult". Have a look at the most recent SharePoint Pitstop blog at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-sharepoint-blog/sharepoint-roadmap-pitstop-december...  which gives info about new & upcoming features.

There are many features in a classic site that are no longer supported  and usually just don't work on a modern site. You can find out more about the differences at https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/SharePoint-classic-and-modern-experiences-5725c103-505d-4a6...

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#6]

@RobElliott - WOW, thank you for the comprehensive reply - much appreciated!