Good question. In the above post I was thinking in terms of first launch but in reality it’s not that simple. At Enterprise Companies a prior community always exists in some form.
To give a concrete example of what I mean, the communities that preceded our Discourse were spread across multiple platforms:
- Yammer(Viva Engage)
- Sharepoint
- Microsoft Teams
and this made expectation management significantly harder.
Users coming from viva engage had the expectation of “I can post anything I feel like”. The team running it didn’t moderate, and simply said yes to the whims of every manager that approached them. This resulted in communities simply for the sake of satisfying a manger’s KPI. There would be a new community, a spike for 3 months, and then death. Needless to say there was a large coaching and communication effort needed to overcome this way of thinking and to advocate why exactly that approach fails after a few months, and why our structured, long term approach would provide them with better results after 6-12 months(but would be slower to begin with).
Sharepoint created the expectation of “I can upload any file I want”. At enterprise level you need to be mega careful about openly sharing files. Each customer and service provider has their own contract with the company, and each file they share with us has different confidentiality requirements. Sharepoint lets the user configure who can access that file exactly, but Discourse doesn’t(and rightfully so, it’s not a file sharing platform). I got around this by encouraging users to upload files to sharepoint, and share links to those files. If someone couldn’t access the shared file they could ask for permission in the topic. A pain in the ass, but cheaper than a lawsuit.
MSTeams created an expectation of “I can have my own channel/community partition here”. Nope, the whole point of Discourse was to be the exact opposite of that. Our goal for the project was to create knowledge sharing rather than knowledge silos. The teams channels were a good solution for confidential or project specific knowledge, but anything that could be abstracted to a more general context was encouraged to be shared in Discourse.