Build a Community Hub with Yammer and SharePoint
Most of the organizations I work with do not have a solution for enabling cross-organization knowledge sharing through different types of communities. Combining the power of SharePoint’s content services and Yammer conversations, companies can facilitate robust knowledge communities built around people, conversations and content.
Depending on your organization, you will have a need for different types of communities. I typically see three somewhat distinct types of communities:
- Knowledge communities which are centered on specific technical or industry specific topics relevant to a specific organization.
- Social impact communities which are focused on important social issues that impact people within an organization
- Recreational communities which are focused on lighter-weight, extra-curricular areas of interest for people within an organization
Obviously, in each of these areas, these communities take different shapes based on many different factors from industry to company size to geography and so on. In all cases, however, they have a need to enable conversations among interested users, share both informal and formal knowledge resources and enable an org-chart-agnostic means for sharing information throughout an organization.
In Office 365, we have two key tools to enable this type of community engagement: SharePoint Online and Yammer.
We focus on Yammer as the service to support the communication and connection among people across an organization and we focus on SharePoint as a tool to share and curate content while also unifying the communities under a single umbrella. This is a solution I call Community Hub.
A Community Hub starts with a SharePoint Online hub site. A hub site in SharePoint Online is a SharePoint site that uses the modern communication site template but also provides special features linking member sites. The key features relevant to this post are the following:
- The ability to automatically scope search results in a hub site to content contained in its member sites
- The ability to roll up articles (news) across member sites
- The ability to roll up events across member sites
Of course, in addition to these key features of hub sites, a communication site can also embed Yammer within them to expose the conversations.
Remember that once you create that communication site, you have configure it as a hub site.
Once you have your Community Hub site, create additional sites for your various communities. Because individual community sites are meant for sharing out information, these community sites should use the modern communication site template as well. As your solution matures, you may even consider creating a site design that “templatizes” your community site layout.
One small note: “community site” in this article is not the classic SharePoint community site template or another out-of-box site template provided by Microsoft. Rather, this is the concept of a modern communication site that facilitates content and conversations around a community topic.
In line with standard SharePoint best practice, each community site should have two or more site owners. However, in the case of these community sites, the goal for these owners is to not only manage the administrative aspects of the SharePoint site but also be passionate about the community topic and drive content and conversation around that topic within the site and corresponding Yammer group.
Speaking of conversation, this is where Yammer comes in. Each community site should have a corresponding Yammer group that serves as the conversation layer for these sites. The site home page should expose the corresponding Yammer feed for that community using the Yammer conversations web part.
Notice in the image above that the conversation is exposed alongside curated community content.
By bringing the Yammer conversation into the community site, we provide a unified entry point for users to connect with content and conversation around the community topic.
The big next step is to unify your community sites within the community hub. This consists of two steps:
- Add your community site to the Community Hub as a member site
- Add your community site to the Community Hub’s shared navigation
To add your community site as a member site, you need to associate that community site with the Community Hub hub site.
Once that is complete, configure your Community Hub site navigation and with your new community site.
The Community Hub strategy provides a hub to bring social, business and recreational communities together within an organization. It connects people to content, conversations and one another.
SharePoint Hub sites and the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph unify these communities under a single umbrella making it easy for users to find specific topics and discover new communities of interest.
