Create Community Site Collection in SharePoint Online

In this article, I would like to share the procedure to create a Community Site collection in SharePoint 2013 online using an Admin portal.

What is a Community Site?

In SharePoint 2013 a Community Site is a new site template that provides a forum experience in the SharePoint environment. Use communities to categorize and cultivate discussions among a broad group of people across organizations in a company. Communities promote open communication and information exchange by enabling people to share their expertise and seek help from others with knowledge in specific areas of interest. You can deploy a Community Portal to promote communities to users within your enterprise.

Procedure to create a Community Site collection.

Step 1. Open the “Microsoft Online Portal” (Admin Center) in your browser as in the following.

URL:  https://portal.microsoftonline.com/default.aspx

Provide the username and password to log in to the portal, then you will be navigated to the online portal (Admin Center) as shown below.

Step 2. Then click on the “Admin” dropdown on the portal. On the dropdown select“SharePoint” as shown below.

Step 3. When you click on SharePoint you will be navigated to “SharePoint Admin Center” as shown below.

Step 4. Click on “New” from the ribbon bar as shown in the following and then select “private site collection”.

Step 5. Then you will get the dialog box to create the site collection when you select the private site collection as shown below.

Step 6. By default the team site collection will be selected in your dialog box, there you can choose the Community Site template as shown below.

Step 7. Then provide the following details on the dialog box as you need.

• Title
• Web site address
• SharePoint version
• Language
• Type of template
• Time zone
• The administrator of the site collection
• Storage Quota
• Server Resource Quota

After providing all the preceding details click “OK” to create the site collection.

Finally, a Community Site collection will be created in SharePoint Online.

Summary

In this article, we explored how to create a Community Site collection in SharePoint 2013 online.