How Aurea Social 2013 Communities differ from Aurea Social Communities

Making “Social” and “Non-social” sites

In SharePoint 2010 with Aurea Social, only Community sites are “social” by default (having a stream and generating activity events). Other types of sites can be made social by activating newsfeed integration in them and adding web parts to them, or by converting them to a community.

SharePoint 2013 has three types of sites which by default can be considered as “social”:

• Team sites
• Project sites
• Community sites

In their default, “out of box” deployment, these site types differ from one another in their social behaviors. When Aurea Social is installed, all of these site types automatically attain a consistent set of behaviors (without need for an administrator to manually activate them):

• They have a stream view on front page
• Users can target microblogs and questions to the streams of any number of these sites from anywhere (for example, I can ask a question from the My Site and send it to three of these sites)
• The creation of any item on any of the standard list or library types in these sites creates an activity stream event for me if I am following the community – regardless of whether I have added individuals in that community as colleagues (for example, any new document, wiki, discussion, blog, announcement, task, calendar, bookmark, or picture – creates an event that I can see on my My Site)
• All of these sites have reporting and administration controls

Using SharePoint’s site creation flow is the standard way to create a community. Depending on which type of socially-enabled site you want, change the template selection to either Team Site, Project Site, or Community Site on the Collaboration tab, or change it to any option on the NewsGator tab.

The Idea Campaign sites pictured here are included if you have the Idea Stream module.

New Sharepoint Site

Creating a Team Site

In the screenshot above, the template selection of “Team Site” allows creation of a team site. Creating a team site results in a site that looks something like this:

DemoForDocumentation

Creating a SharePoint community site

Creating a Aurea Social community using the SharePoint out-of-box “community” template is a similar flow to creating a Team site, just with the Community Site template selected:

Select a template

One important difference between creating a community site and creating a team site occurs if you choose to break inheritance and use specific permissions (when creating a private community for example).

Select Permissions

In the case of a Community site, the Set Up Groups page appears to default to existing groups, but it is actually set to create new groups exclusive to the new site.

You may want to leave the default settings on this page unchanged (see example below) because SharePoint is going to apply these security groups automatically. If you change groups on this screen, you can end up with missing permissions.

You can go back and change groups later if you desire.

Set up Groups

In this example, :

A private community using the SharePoint community site creates a site like this

The Discussions link goes to the SharePoint 2013 community discussion. The Categories link is for managing discussion categories.

Creating a NewsGator Community Site

If you want to have some standard pre-defined types of communities (or you have been using the Aurea Social community “template” feature in SharePoint 2010), you can choose to select this option from the NewsGator tab when creating a new site:

Creating a NewsGator Community Site

Templates must be defined in Central Admin for this option to work.

If you are familiar with how this capability worked in SharePoint 2010, you find the flow to be very similar. The site creator is presented with one or more template choices (in the case pictured here, only one has been defined).

Community setup

1. Click Select. Setup screen is displayed.
2. Click OK on this screen to completes the process.

Click Ok

Creating a non-social site

In the first step of creating a new site (see below), you can see a Blank Site option in the Template Selection area. Aurea Social adds this to make it easier for administrators to create a site which has no social features.

Select template