Groups are Containers
Telligent Community uses groups as logical containers for members and applications as well as the data they produce. Note that:
- Groups are the organizing structure for application and membership data.
- Groups can be nested, meaning that they can contain subgroups.
To picture how Telligent Community's groups are structured, think of the people in your organization, then mentally organize them into functional groups and identify their communication needs. For example, you might have a Product Group in your organization that makes announcements (blogs); writes documentation (wikis); provides downloads (galleries); and field support requests (forums).
Group Types
There are five group types, which govern the way the group can behave regarding membership in the system. The types include:
- Private Unlisted - Community members can't see this group's activity or users.
- Private Listed - Community members can see users and group activity, but can't participate in group activity.
- Public Closed - Community members can see group activity, but can't see the activity of group members.
- Public Open - Community members can see group members and activity.
- Joinless - Membership isn't tracked (that is, there are no members). Site-level roles control the group's permissions using site-level permissions. Joinless groups are managed by system administrators unless an administrator creates a special role for managing this group.
Membership Types
Within a group, there are three levels of membership: Group members (can create and view group content, view group members, and invite prospective members); Group managers (have the same permission as group members, but additionally can manage the group); and Group owners (have the same permissions a manager has but also can control group settings, add new members, modify the group theme, create new applications, create new roles, and and modify role permissions.
Group Creation and Management
Group creation is contextual - meaning that you use the pencil tool to create a group in the context where it will reside. For example, if you want to create a site-level group, you click the site-level pencil tool and access the Manage contextual panel. The following screen capture shows the Manage Group contextual panel that appears Manage group.