The basic components of Telligent Community Server include:
Community
A community is built around engagement, collaboration, and content. Community Server provides community structure, collaboration applications, and social tools to:
- Build the context for member contribution.
- Control access to the community, groups, and applications.
- Promote collaboration and conversation.
- Create and measure reputation.
Groups
Groups provide the context - membership and content creation tools - for user contribution. In Community Server groups, members are organized according to a commonality - such as corporate function or content access - within the broader community. Group membership types, as discussed in Membership, control access to group functions. Applications (blogs, forums, media galleries, wikis, ideas) provide the means of content creation and collaboration.
Membership
Community Server uses community membership, group membership, roles, and permissions to control access to functions and content. Community membership confers certain permissions by community role, while group membership confers permissions within a group. For example, community membership is required for profile creation, and group membership is required for forum posting within a group.
Community membership
Community membership is a prerequisite of most community functions. Non-members, for example, can only read content. Members have the ability to post and reply or comment.
Group membership
Group access is controlled firstly by group type and secondly by group membership type. A group's type may be listed (searchable), unlisted (not searchable), joinless (invitation-only), or joinful (can be joined). Group membership types include:
- Owners, who administer the group and control how it looks.
- Managers, who perform membership functions (like managing members) or content functions.
- Members, who participate in the group and generate content.
Each group contains optional applications (blogs, forums, media galleries, wikis, and/or ideas) that members use to generate content, as well as an activity stream that shows additions or changes and status messages. Group members can:
- Create and reply to status messages.
- Create and curate group content individually.
- Collaborate with each other in applications.
- Comment to the author or to other commenters on content pages.
- Utilize social application tools to:
- Indicate liking or rating.
- Add other members using mentions.
- Hashtag the content, comment, thread, or reply to create or link to a discussion.
Roles
Users are organized by roles, which control access to many functions within the community. For example, anonymous users (those only in the Everyone role) who haven't joined the community can only read forum threads but can't reply. Registered Users can reply to threads.
Out-of-the-box roles include Everyone, Registered users, and admins. You can create other custom roles around particular functions, such as one devoted to company employees.
Roles can be used to encourage and reward participation. For example, by building sufficient reputation points, a member can unlock a privilege such as forum moderation.
Group membership provides access to status messages, applications, content, and other functions, depending on the membership type. For example, group members can access content; group managers can manage group applications and members; and group owners can change the group theme and add or remove applications.
Permissions
Permissions are used to fine-tune functional access. They are granted to site roles or group membership types. For example, by default a (site role) Registered User only has permission to post a forum reply. By joining the group, he is now a group member and can post a new forum thread.
Each permission - such as Blog - Create Posts - grants a specific functionality in the community, for example creating blog posts. If the member's site role or group membership type doesn't have that permission, he or she can't perform that function. Permissions are not granted at the user level.
Applications
Applications are used for content creation, interation, and member collaboration. Using Community Server applications in your community, members can:
- Make announcements and share new using blogs. To get more information, please see Blog posting.
- Ask questions or hold discussions using forums. To learn more about forums, please see Forum posting.
- Share content and media with media galleries. To find out how to use media galleries, please see Media gallery posting.
- Create documentation using wikis. To see how wikis can be used, please see Wiki posting.
- Share and vote on ideas.
Social tools
Telligent's social tools help members converse and engage, providing them the ability to create conversations and add people to discussions. Members can also use social tools to indicate content liking and rating, and report abusive comments or replies.
The social tools include:
- Abuse - Report abuse as a user or moderate as an admin.
- Achievements - Achievements are awarded on the basis of rules, which include various actions in the community (such as posting, commenting, receiving likes, ratings, etc.) Achievements reward participation and influence.
- Activity streams - Contains user activity lists scoped to the community, group, or individual member.
- Comments - Create a dialog with a content author to improve content, address points or ask for clarification.
- Forum replies - Answer questions or reply to the original point to further the discussion.
- Hashtagging - Add the content to discussion of the hashtagged term.
- Likes - Show agreement with or approval of a status message, comment, or content.
- Mentions - Add other community members to a discussion and notify the members so they can participate.
- OAuth logins - Use social credentials such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or Salesforce to simultaneously log into the community while logging into the social medium.
- Ratings - Show sentiment for content.
- Reputation points - Accumulate points based upon quantity and quality of contributions and engagement across the community.
- Status messages and replies - Quick "microblogging" messages to update the community about activities, current and future events, news, feedback, or other information.
- Twitter feed - The Twitter feed looks and acts like Twitter from inside the community, giving members Twitter functionality as well as some activity stream functionality.