Most visitors to your portal belong to one or more communities. By creating separate communities within your portal, you can determine what access your portal visitors have to content and functionality. You can even specify community-specific settings for the gears that appear on the portal page. For example, you could customize a weather forecasting content gear to provide local weather information for a remote office.

Each community has its own pages, with customized content, layout, and colors. The more your visitors tell you about themselves and their preferences, the more specific and customized their communities can become.