Communities and Collaboration

The portal collaboration feature allows end users to create and join communities, and interact with other community members through a set of collaborative portlet applications (community services). Communities is, therefore, an association of members and services. These services are: file share, shared tasks & events, polls & surveys, wiki, and discussions.

Communities are created and administered by end-users. The creating user becomes the delegated administrator for that community. The portal administrator can define community templates that defines the layout mechanism and the available services, and end-users can create communities within categories using the available template(s). Users must join to take part in community collaboration. All communities are public, in that any user may join a community.

An end-user can

• Search for a community based on the community name and description. Then the user can join a community that is discovered via searching.

• Browse through community names and descriptions based on categories. Then the user can join a community that is discovered via browsing.