4.4 Using Communities and Community Membership

Communities are a way to group items that a specific set of members can find useful and work together to maintain. There are three ways to become a member of a community:

  • Open: These communities allow you to join whenever you want.

  • Invite Only: These communities will send an invitation to invite you to join.

  • By Request: These communities allow you to request membership from the community owner.

When you receive an invitation to join a community and you accept it, a community icon shows in your community list (left sidebar) by default. You can hide a community’s icon later in your preferences if you decide it isn’t a community that you will reference often. For more information on preferences, see Section 4.6, Setting Preferences.

A community icon () with a padlock indicates that you are a consumer-type member without owner or producer permissions. Therefore, all data is available to view, search and report on, but you won’t be able to create new CIs or save Searches/Reports to community pages.

Each of your communities contributes to the information summarized on the Home’s Summary page. If you want to create your own community, for more information about creating and setting up a community, see Section 7.0, Managing Communities.

The following topics provide instructions regarding community membership:

4.4.1 Accepting an Invitation to Join a Community

  1. Do the following, as applicable:

    • If invitations to join communities are found in your Inbox, to accept the invitation, click Accept next to the invitation to display a confirmation message:

    • If a community invitation disappears from your Inbox before you have a chance to accept it, click Actions, select Manage Communities, then browse to the desired community.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • Click Yes to confirm that you wish to join.

    • Click No to cancel and not join the community.

4.4.2 Finding Open Communities to Join

  1. Click Action at the top of the page, then select Join Communities.

    A list of all available communities displays.

  2. Find the desired community, then click Join.

    If the community is Open, you are now a member of the community and a community icon displays on the left side of your pages.

    If the community is By Request, the owner of the community must approve your request before you can become a member.

4.4.3 Leaving Communities

Leaving a Single Community

  1. Click the community name under the community’s icon, then select Details.

    An Edit Community dialog box displays.

  2. Click Leave next to Member Status.

  3. From the confirmation message, click Yes to cancel your membership.

Leaving Multiple Communities

To withdraw from more than one community, you can follow the directions in Leaving a Single Community individually for each community, or you can do the following:

  1. Click Action, then select Leave a community.

    A list of all communities you belong to displays.

  2. Click Leave for each community where you wish to cancel your membership.