The Communities Tab

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 are, therefore, an association of members and services. These services are: file share, shared tasks & events, polls & surveys, wiki, discussions, and blog. For more information on these services, see Part XI, Service Providers and Portlets, in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Technical Reference.

Communities are created and managed by end-users. The user can be in one or more roles (visitor, owner, member, invited, pending, rejected). The community owner can set the access control on the community content, membership, and visibility of the community. The owner of the community can also remove the community or transfer ownership of the community. For more information, see Managing a Portal Server Community in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Administration Guide.

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 templates. See Understanding Community Templates in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Administration Guide for more information. Users must join to take part in community collaboration.

Each portal will have its own set of communities. Communities within a portal will only be visible to users in that portal. The community users are stored in a relational database, one database instance per portal (see Chapter 9, Managing Java DB for Portal Server, in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Installation and Configuration Guide for more information).

This tab showcases the following channels:

• The My Communities channel lists the communities that the user is a member of or an owner of.

• The Communities channel allows the user to create a new community or find a community.