Overview of Communities

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 II, Community Services.

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 Chapter 3, Managing a 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 templates. See Chapter 4, Understanding Community Templates 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 2, Configuring the Database for more information).

This release includes community management functionality through the Portal Server management console and through the command line. See Technical Note on Technical Note: Managing Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Update 1 Communities for more information on managing the communities from the command line.