Collaboration is crucial for achieving success with a social intranet, and communities are an excellent tool for facilitating it. Communities are ideal for teams or projects that require interaction, organization, and discussions on relevant topics. They can also serve as a platform for off-topic conversations, such as exchanges within the company.

Participation in communities is entirely voluntary. Users can be invited or added to communities, but they have the freedom to decide whether to stay in them or not. We highly recommend enabling users to create communities, so they can establish their own collaboration channels with colleagues on various topics.

For sharing editorial content or official company news, we suggest using pages instead of communities.

Features

These are the features of communities:

• The Communities overview: By default, the Communities overview shows you all the communities you have access to, allowing you to quickly find and join relevant and interesting communities. You can search and apply filters to view communities based on activation status, membership status, and category. Communities are sorted alphabetically.
• Community members: Users belonging to a community are referred to as Members. Users can see who belongs to a community and who is an admin under Members. From the Members list, admins can upgrade regular users to admins and invite new users to the community. Learn more in this article:
  • Managing community members
• File library: When you create a community, a file library is automatically created. This library can be accessed and edited by admins under Manage files. Each app has a subfolder within the library where any files uploaded to that app are stored by default. Learn more in this article:
  • File library overview
• Creating communities: You can create communities in the Communities overview, provided you have the necessary permissions. A community can be Public, Protected, or Private. Users can receive an invite to join a community and are notified via the notification bell. Additionally, if your platform uses multi-language, you can add translations for your community. Learn more in this article:
  • Creating communities
  • Providing community names and descriptions in other languages
• Adding content to communities: After a community is created, content has to be added to it by adding apps and widgets. A newly created community is empty until it's designed. Learn more in this article:
  • Adding content to communities
• Inviting users to join communities: Community membership is always voluntary, but admins can invite users to join their community. Alternatively, users can freely join public communities or request to join protected communities. Notifications are sent for new invites and when a user joins a community. Learn more in this article:
  • Inviting users to join communities
• Archiving or deleting communities: An admin can archive or delete a community. An archived community remains accessible while a deleted community is removed. Learn more in this article:
  • Archiving or deleting communities
• Using categories for communities: Communities can be labeled with categories for users to filter by to find relevant communities more easily. Categories can be applied to a community in the community's settings. Learn more in this article:
  • Using categories for communities
• Inviting external people to communities: If you want to collaborate with external parties, such as consultants, on a project within a community, you can invite them to join your community. Externals are assigned the External Community Member default role, specifically designed to allow external members to participate in your communities. Learn more in this article:
  • Adding external users to communities
• Communities on mobile: Communities can also be accessed on the mobile app. Learn more in this article:
  • Communities on mobile

Permissions

These are the permissions related to communities:

• "Access communities": Activates the Communities overview in the navigation bar. This is required for the below permissions to function.
• "Create community": Allows users to create communities in the Communities overview. 
• "Edit community": Allows users to edit communities and their settings if they are also an admin of the communities.
• "Manage apps of a community": Allows users to add and manage apps on a community. Only apps that have been activated in the Administration can be added.
• "Delete community": Allows users to delete communities if they are also an admin of the communities.
• "Manage Categories" (under Communities): Allows users to create, edit, and delete categories on the Communities overview.
• "Invite external": Allows users to invite external members to a community.

Best Practices

Looking for examples and tips regarding communities? Find inspiration in these articles:

• Provide a help community for your users
• Creating communities for interest groups
• Using communities for teams, project groups or other collaborations