Creating communities

Start a community to encourage people in your organization who have similar interests or goals to collaborate with one another.

To start a community, complete the following steps:

1. From any view in the Communities tab, click Start a Community.
2. If you are not already logged in, you are prompted for a user name and password. Provide the requested information, and then click Log In.
3. Required: In the Name field, type a name for the community. Choose a name that identifies the purpose of the community.
   Note: You cannot have multiple public or moderated communities with the same name, however you can have multiple restricted communities with the same name. This naming system allows a public and a restricted community with the same name, or a moderated and a restricted community with the same name.
4. Required: Specify the level of access that you want for your community as follows:

   Table 1. Community access level options

   Option	Description
   Public to my organization	Select this option if you want the community to be public with anyone within your organization able to join.
   Moderated	Select this option if you want the community to be public but for users within your organization to request membership.
   Restricted	Select this option if you want the community to be restricted. Restricted communities are available only to those people who are added to the community as members or invited to join by a community owner.

5. If you are creating a restricted community and you want to allow community owners to invite external users to join the community, select the External access check box.
   Note: Only certain people with specific privileges can see and select the External access check box.
   Note: If you create a restricted community and you do not select the External access check box, the restricted community is created as an internal community and no external users can be added to it.
   Note: You cannot invite external users to join public or moderated communities.
6. Type a description of the purpose of the community in the Description field. Be as specific as possible. Identify the community's goals.
7. Optional: Enter one or more tags in the Tags field. Tags are keywords that you define to provide users with more ways to identify what a community is all about. Tags must be a single word or multiple words that are connected with underscores or hyphens. For example, a community that deals with accessibility issues might have the tags accessibility and low-vision. Tags give users more than one way to find a community of interest. The tags that you define here display with the community in the Public Communities view.
8. Click Access Advanced Features and enter the names of the people that you want to add as community members. You can search for names from your organization's directory. Type-ahead predicts the name that you are typing by comparing it to names in the directory that your administrator specified. If it proposes the name that you want, click to add it.
   Note: Hover the mouse over a person's name to see if they are an external user .
   If you do not want to add community members now, you can add them at a later stage, for more information, see How do I add community members?
   Note: To add community owners, click the Down arrow next to Members and select Owners, then repeat the process that is described in this step for adding community members.
9. To generate a web address for your community, enter a one-word, unique term that identifies the community in the Web Address field. You and other community members can use this web address to access the community. These terms are case-sensitive, so community members must use the correct case when they access the community with the URL. If you do not want to create a community web address, leave this field blank.

   Because web addresses must be kept unique, other users might learn that a particular web address is in use even if it is for a restricted community. Avoid web addresses that are sensitive or confidential in nature.

   Tip: Be sure to bookmark the full web address that displays when you complete the Web Address field to save the direct URL to the community.
   Notes:

   • Certain keywords with a technical meaning, such as html or Atom, are reserved and cannot be used in community web addresses. If you enter a reserved keyword, an error message is displayed, and you are prompted to enter a different keyword.
   • If your web address contains a non-alphanumeric character, such as an ampersand (&), you must escape the character by using a forward slash ( / ) before the character.
   • If you do not see the option to create a web address for your community in the user interface, your administrator disabled this option.
10. Click Upload a Community Image to browse for an image to associate with the community on the overview page. The image must be 155 x 155 pixels in size, and it can be in .jpeg, .gif, or .png format.

    There are no file size restrictions. However, because the image is resized to 15 KB to fit the allocated space in the user interface, the server takes more time to process larger files.

    Image resizing does not support all image formats. If you encounter problems with uploading an image, converting the image to a different format often works.

11. To apply a different theme to the community, click Change Community Theme and select a theme.
12. If moderation is available and editable at your site, you can select from the following options:
    • Owners must approve all content (widgets) where widgets might be one or more of the following widgets: Blog, Files, or Forums. When this option is enabled, community owners can review unpublished content that is submitted for approval and decide whether to publish it to the community or reject it.
    • Viewers can flag inappropriate content (widgets) where widgets might be one or more of the following widgets: Blog, Files, or Forums. When this option is enabled, community owners can review content that is flagged as inappropriate by other users. Community owners can then decide whether to keep the content or remove it from the community.
    For more information about moderation in communities, see Moderating community content.
13. Click Save.