How do you upgrade and troubleshoot Social Feed communities in Involv intranet?
Bring communities created with an earlier version of the Social Feed up to date, and find the cause of the most common Social Feed issues.
1. Overview
From Involv intranet 5.5, the Social Feed recognises posts by their content type: a post, a question or a poll. Communities that were set up with an earlier version do not have these content types yet. Until such a community is promoted again, all of its posts, including new ones, are stored under the older page name. The feed only finds those posts when the setting Include posts from communities that have not been updated is turned on.
Upgrading therefore comes down to four steps, in this order: approve the API permissions, turn on the legacy setting, promote every existing community again, and turn the legacy setting off once all communities are done. This article walks through each step and then covers the issues administrators run into most often.
2. What you'll learn
- How to approve the API permissions the Social Feed needs
- How to keep existing and new posts visible during the upgrade
- How to promote existing communities again, and who can do it
- What changes for existing posts during the upgrade
- How to check that a promotion finished
- How to solve common Social Feed issues
3. Approve the API permissions
The Social Feed reads communities, their members and their sites through Microsoft Graph, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. After the new package is added to the app catalog, the permission requests appear in the SharePoint admin center under Advanced > API access. Someone with the Global Administrator or Application Administrator role approves them there.
| Resource | Scope |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Graph | User.Read.All, GroupMember.Read.All, GroupMember.ReadWrite.All, Sites.Read.All |
| Office 365 Exchange Online | Group.ReadWrite.All, Group.ReadWrite.All.Sdp |
| Windows Azure Active Directory | User.Read |
| Office 365 SharePoint Online | AllSites.Read, MyFiles.Read |
These are delegated permissions: the Social Feed acts on behalf of the signed-in user and can never do more than that user is already allowed to do. GroupMember.ReadWrite.All is only used to let people leave a community.
Until the permissions are approved, the Social Feed looks empty rather than broken: the feed shows No community access, My Groups and the Social Feed Manager show no or incomplete communities, and joining or leaving does not work.
4. Keep posts visible during the upgrade
Turn on Include posts from communities that have not been updated in every Social Feed, My Groups and Community Highlight web part that shows existing communities. Do this before you start promoting. Without it, both the older posts and the posts written since the update stay out of the feed until their community is promoted.
Make sure the setting is also on for the Social Feed page your communities point to. That is where links in SharePoint comment emails lead, so a post that cannot be found there is reported as gone.
5. Promote existing communities again
Open the Social Feed Manager, click New community and choose Promote an existing site. Enter the address of the community site, decide whether the homepage should be laid out again (turn Lay out the homepage off if the community has a homepage of its own), and choose Where posts open. Repeat this for every community.
To promote a community, you need to be a site collection administrator of the site the Social Feed Manager is on, and an owner or administrator of the community site itself.
Promoting a community that is already a community is safe and changes nothing that is already in order. The promotion moves the existing posts onto the new content types, adds the redirect that opens a post in the feed to every post that does not have it yet, installs the Involv intranet apps the site needs and stores where posts should open.
One promotion moves up to 1,000 posts onto the content types and checks up to 2,000 posts for the redirect. For larger communities, the dialog reports Not all of its existing posts have been updated yet: promote the community again, and it continues where it stopped. Repeat until the message no longer appears. When the dialog reports Some of its existing posts could not be updated, promoting again runs into the same problem; the reason is logged in the browser console (see section 7).
When every community has been promoted completely, turn Include posts from communities that have not been updated off again. Matching on page names can otherwise pull in other pages with a similar name.
6. What changes for existing posts
Moving a post onto a content type keeps its date and its author. Adding the redirect works differently: the page has to be saved, so a post that receives the redirect is marked as modified by the administrator who ran the promotion, at the time of the promotion.
This only affects the Recently updated sort order of the feed. Newest first, Oldest first and the date shown on each post stay the same. Because no post written before 5.5 has the redirect yet, the first promotion after the upgrade touches almost every existing post.
Promoting again is also the way to repair a post that lost its redirect, for example because someone edited the page or restored an older version of it. Every promotion checks all posts again.
7. Check that a promotion finished
The dialog names the step that is running. For more detail, open the developer tools of your browser (F12) and look at the console while the promotion runs. Every step writes one line starting with Involv:INFO, with counts such as how many pages were read, how many of them were posts and how many were updated. Problems are logged as Involv:WARNING or Involv:ERROR and name the page or app they are about. Include these lines when you contact support.
8. Solve common issues
The feed shows "No community access", or overviews stay empty. Check first that the API permissions have been approved (section 3). If they have, the reader is not a member of any of the communities configured in the feed.
Posts disappeared after the update. The community has not been promoted yet and the legacy setting is off. Turn on Include posts from communities that have not been updated and promote the community.
A new post does not appear for colleagues. Posts appear in the feed of others once SharePoint search has indexed them. This usually takes a few minutes, but can take longer when SharePoint is busy. The author sees their own post immediately, and the feed checks for new posts every 60 seconds by default. A new community in My Groups, or in a feed set to Found through search, appears with the same delay.
Creating a community fails with "Could not create the community". The community is created as the signed-in user, so the Microsoft 365 group creation policy of your tenant applies. The message is followed by the error SharePoint returned. If your tenant restricts group creation, ask someone who is allowed to create groups to create the Microsoft 365 group site, and then use Promote an existing site.
Someone cannot join a community. Only accounts with an Exchange mailbox can become a member of the Microsoft 365 group behind a community. Without a mailbox, the user sees You can't join this community because your account has no mailbox. Please contact your IT department.
A request to join stays pending. The pending status is kept in the browser of the person who asked, for at most 14 days. After that, Join community is offered again.
A new community does not show up. A new or promoted community has to be added to the Community Sites of the Social Feed Manager and of feeds that use a configured list. Public communities appear on their own when Show public communities is on, and feeds set to Found through search pick up every community, once SharePoint has indexed it.
Members receive no Social Feed notifications. Social Feed notifications are sent through the Azure notification service. Tenants that still use the earlier notification service do not receive them.
A post opens on a bare page or shows a placeholder. The site is missing the Social Feed solution or the post is missing its redirect. Promote the community again.
You need to see the page that stores a post. Add ?SocialFeedNoRedirect=1 to the address of the page. It then stays put and offers a link to the feed.
9. Result
Your existing communities now work the same way as new ones: posts are recognised by their content type, links in emails open the post in the feed, and the order of the feed is kept. When something does not work, you know where to look first.
For related topics, see How do you create and manage communities with the Social Feed Manager in Involv intranet? and How do you configure the Social Feed web part in Involv intranet?.
Involv version 5.5