Managing a Community

If you are in charge of creating, developing, or maintaining an online community for your organization, you may want to become familiar with the Community Administration Dashboard. This side of the system provides the Community Administrator with tools to configure, customize, and manage the community. Please note that having administrator credentials will not provide access to the member interface of the community. 

Administrators can grant additional individuals with limited administrator access so they can manage only specific areas within the community. For example, a Community Administrator might want to provide a Web designer with the sections used to customize the look and feel of the site; on the other hand, a community moderator might be more interested in utilizing the sections allowing him/her to review postings to group discussions.

Once a Community Administrator has logged in, he/she sees a Community Administration Dashboard looks similar to the screen capture below.

Across the top of the dashboard, there are tabs you can manage the appropriate sections of thecommunity.

Below these tabs, direct links to specific administrator features are grouped by functional area.

This dashboard provides you with the means to:

• Setup for your community.
• Send out invitations to prospective community members.
• Review your community members.
• Manage Groups.
• Schedule real-time online discussions using chat rooms.
• Conduct opinion Opinion Polls.
• Manage Blogs.
• Configure meetings.
• Create community-wide event schedules.
• Post targeted ads.
• Configure individual roles and rights for members and administrators.
• Review community activity through a set of interactive Analytics dashboards.
• Configure system settings such as setting up External Authentication for login using Single Sign On.
• Review real-time Watch Notifications sent to members via email.
• Manage community Tags.
• Create or review one or more Wikis.
• Utilize Moderation tools.
• Manage the places available within your community for Geo Social Networking.
• Create and update custom pages.