Overview of the Community Sample

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, and discussions.

Communities are created and managed by end-users. The user can be in one or more roles (visitor, owner, member). The owner of the community can remove the community or transfer ownership of the 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). See Chapter 7, Community Template for more information. 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.

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 6, Open-Source Java DB for more information).