As a community owner, you’ll create the community, then build community membership, either organically (as people request membership) or by invitation. Before inviting members to join, here are the main items that you (and your producers) should consider setting up to make the community user-friendly for your consumer-type users:
Registering and maintaining configuration items
For more information, see Section 6.1, Registering CIs and Section 6.2, Copying, Moving, or Linking Objects.
Creating and saving some basic searches
For more information, see Section 5.2.6, Saving a Search Query.
Creating a library of useful reports
For more information, see Section 5.3.5, Creating Reports.
Creating favorites for the community’s Summary page, which contains links to prominent CIs, saved searches, and reports
For more information, see Section 7.5, Setting Favorites for Community Summary Pages.
To manage communities, review the following sections:
As a community owner, you might decide to create the community as an Invite Only community. This give you time to establish a baseline by creating some CIs or building reports before other users are involved. Producers, members that can help you populate the community before the others while the community is being ramped up. For how you would bring producer members on board early, see Section 7.3, Inviting Members to Join Invite Only Communities. When you are ready, you can invite users to join or switch the community over to be an Open or By Request community.
If a community is already established and somewhat mature, there are two strategies you can use to develop new items and objects without surfacing them before they are ready:
Utilize your myWorkspace area to define the items, then move, link, or copy them over when ready
Create a private community that is only accessible by you and selected producers
This strategy has the advantage of allowing multiple users to contribute data before publication. For this purpose, we suggest a similar naming convention to the active community, such as CommunityName_Dev to help identify the exact purpose of this private development area.
There are various types of communities:
Open: Communities are always public and visible to everyone. Users can join and leave at will.
By Request: Communities are always public and visible to everyone. Users can request membership and those requests show in your Inbox if you are the community owner.
Invite Only: Communities can be either public or private/hidden. Members can only join by invitation.
Based on the type of community, it is completely visible or private/hidden to CMS users.
To build a successful community, you not only need members that find your information helpful but members that can actively contribute information. Community members can have one of the following two roles:
Producers: Able to contribute to the community by creating and maintaining CIs, save searches and reports for the community and, managed favorites for community Summary pages.
Consumers: Can only view community data. The consumer user does not have permission to contribute to community information.