SharePoint 2010 Create a FAQ with standard features

Often an Intranet offers a FAQ, in order to give information regarding most upcoming questions, for example for IT Stuff

• Whom to contact if something is not working properly
• What to do if the virus scanner making many alerts
• How to connect your mobile phone to Exchange

And things like this. If your Intranet based on SharePoint, this post might be interesting for you. I would like to share how you can create a FAQ with the standard features SharePoint offers.

Best Practice of FAQs you will find here a nice article (in german). It says that you should pay attention to

• the amount of FAQs should be about 20
• there should be a search
• if you have more than 40 FAQs you should offer categories
• you should use easy words, no buzzwords
• short and clear answers
• you should maybe offer a rating system

These points are all possible with SharePoint standard features. So why not use it? Let me show you some ways to get there.

FAQ 1

Step 1: Create a custom list and name it FAQ

Step 2: Edit the title Column to “Question”

Step 3: Add a new column from type Multine and name it Answer

Step 4: Modify the view and show only these two columns and set the style to newsletter

Step 5: [optional] create a column for category or for ratings and put it into the view as you like (group by category for example)

The Result:

FAQ 2

Step 1: Create a list from type Announcement

Step 2: Customize the columns as you might need them

Step 3: Customize the view (Group by Question or by Category, Show only Answers, e.g)

Result:

FAQ reusable

If you have some more SharePoint Sites in which you might need to use FAQs, then i recommend you to save the created list as template and provide it to other site collections or sites in you SharePoint. You do not have to create the list from scratch more than one time.

You also can set Ratings to your FAQ list. Be creative.

Ressources:

Article 1

Article 2

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