SharePoint Communities

Discussion boards have been a feature of SharePoint in both the last two releases (2010 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). They have been a great way for members of a team to ask questions and share information. With the 2013 release of SharePoint Microsoft have taken the principles of discussion boards and created new sites and features called Communities. These allow the creation of a number of categories to organise discussions, the ability to award “badges” to certain users so that they can be recognised as moderators, and the ability to award points and grades to users.

An introduction to SharePoint communities is given on the official Microsoft SharePoint blog, with details of how to configure communities in a separate post here.