An online community lets a group collaborate on projects, share knowledge, communicate and connect with others, and stay in touch using email subscriptions. Communities have configurable layout pages that help you manage the shared content and also manage the group that defines the community.
Community management with iMIS offers some distinctly defined tools for collaboration and group work on the website. Use the tool that's right for how you want to disseminate the information. For example, put time-sensitive topics in a blog or forum, but put knowledge base articles in a resource library or wiki.
Announcements
These posts display in the Announcements area of the Community page and accept no replies. They allow community administrators to broadcast messages to all community subscribers and members.
Forums
Forums let community members post and reply to discussions. Often forums are organized for specific discussion topics, and community members post in a forum based on the topic they want to discuss with others. Forums contain topics, and subsequent entries on a topic are called posts. When a community member subscribes to a forum, they receive an email every time that a post is added or when someone replies to a topic with a post.
Blogs
Blogs list entries chronologically, typically from newest to oldest, often created by one person. Group blogs contain entries from multiple authors. Entries might offer commentary, news, event announcements, or material such as images or photos or links to other blogs. Blogs can be personal or professional, in a non-profit context, it is likely to be used for communication, connections, community growth or enhancement, marketing, customer support, or public relations purposes. Blogs allow other readers to write comments for individual entries, and readers can subscribe to a blog to receive every blog entry as an email. Community administrators can edit any blog entry.
Wikis
Wikis are grouped collaborative web pages that enable quick editing of the pages by allowing community members to add or edit articles to the community website. Wikis allow anyone to add and edit articles, but you cannot view revision history or the original author or subsequent edits of an article, so these are similar to a wiki. Wikis contain articles. You cannot comment on a wiki article, but you can edit one, if permissions allow. Subscribing to a wiki means that every time an article is added or edited, you receive an email message indicating what has changed.
Resource Library
Libraries store shared files, which are content such as Word or PDF files, forms, or graphics that you want to make available to everyone in the community to download.
Recent Activity
The Recent Activity area offers a view of every content item that has been added or updated in reverse chronological order. It is available in some of the community portal layouts, and subscribing to the Recent Activity is an easy way to ensure you receive an email notification for every content addition or update across the community.
Subscribers
Community administrators can add members based on any number of criteria, such as location or membership type. The subscriber list comprises the roster for the community.