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Welcome to Communities
A community lets people who share a common interest interact with one another.
What makes a community?
Communities are groups of people with a common interest. A public community with open access is available for all to join, while membership of a restricted community is limited to a particular group. You can also start a public community with invitation-only access, allowing you to control membership and moderate access to the community's resources.
A community provides the means for users to stay in touch, share information, and exchange ideas. Communities provide an excellent way to connect members of a project team, organize a task force researching an emerging technology, or bring together a group of people who share any interest.
Use the tools provided with the Communities feature to reach out, make connections, get organized, and start sharing information. As a community owner, you can invite others to join and manage the content and membership for the community.
Communities highlights
Whether you are joining a community or starting one of your own, you can use these features to get the most out of your experience.
- Participate in a community's discussion forum to explore topics of common interest and debate solutions to shared problems.
- Access the Members page to add or remove members from your community. All members of the community can view the list of people who belong to the community.
- Use tags to assign descriptive keywords to your community. Tags are useful for searching for a particular type of community or filtering search results.
- Browse for communities by categories such as Recent (recently updated), Popular (communities with the most members), and Alphabetical.
- Bring information into your community by sharing feeds and bookmarks with fellow members.
- Add extra content to your community to make new functionality available to members. For example, you might want to add a wiki to get your community collaborating or a blog for posting the latest community news.
Accessing the Communities feature
To log in to the Communities feature, go to the Web site designated as the feature home page by the administrator who configured the product. Provide the user name and password created for you by the administrator. To give an additional person access to the feature, contact your administrator; that person must first be added to the appropriate user for the login to be successful.
Communities overviews, how-tos, and FAQs