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Communities are sites within a portal designed for a specific audience or task, such as collaborative projects. The pages, portlets, layout, community preferences, and subcommunities within a community are determined by the community administrator. Although the community administrators determine which portlets are displayed in a community, a portlet itself might allow community members to change the content within each portlet.
You might have communities based on departments in your company. For example, the Marketing department might have a community containing press information, leads volumes, a trade show calendar, and so on. The Engineering department might have a separate community containing project milestones, regulatory compliance requirements, and technical specifications.
You are automatically subscribed to communities based on your group membership. You can also join communities on your own. Some community subscriptions might be mandatory, but you can unsubscribe from those that are not. The communities you are subscribed to appear in the My Communities menu. Some mandatory communities might also appear as tabs in the menu area.
Related Communities displays any communities that are stored in the same administrative folder as the current community.
This menu only appears if you have access to related communities.
Subcommunities are separately-secured subsections in a community, which might have a more restrictive security than the main community. For example, you might have a Marketing Community that includes an Advertising Subcommunity. This Advertising Subcommunity might have distinct owners or might be accessible to only a subset of the Marketing Community.
The Community Knowledge Directory, if enabled, displays community resources in an organizational structure that is relevant to the community (as opposed to the broader portal audience). It includes a list of community members, displayed in the Members folder, and a list of subcommunities, displayed in the Subcommunities folder. Community administrators can also create folders that contain links to relevant web pages, community experts, portal documents, or community pages.
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