Community Types

Communities are often thought of as being "internal" or "external." While some may be limited to just employees or customers, prospects, and partners, the most powerful ones combine a mix of members into a single community of interest. Often, communities that start as only "internal" or "external" evolve to combine members from both audiences, and most companies usually have a combination of different types of communities.

In such communities, it is usually not appropriate for every member to have the same privileges and permissions. You will often want to control which members can read, post, edit, or comment on particular categories of content. For example:

• A community for employees allows selected partners to participate—but the partners can't read confidential information about corporate performance or customers.
• A community for R&D and product managers allows key customers to contribute—but only customers using a particular product can engage in discussions around that product's future.
• A community where customers collaborate around product issues includes subject matter experts from the manufacturer—but only the product managers can post content to the "new product announcements" category.

Awareness takes a holistic view of communities and is unique in its ability to create communities that mix internal and external audiences. Why?

• Enterprise security and control to segment users with different permissions and privileges
• Manual and automated moderation tools to ensure the content is acceptable
• Multiple authentication methods (etc., single sign on, identity management, password) for different audiences
• A Software-as-a-Service platform that can span corporate firewalls so that internal users can easily mix with external users.
• A licensing model that doesn't distinguish between internal and external members

Awareness communities combine four key areas of capability, including user-generated content (blogs, wikis, discussions, photos, videos, voting, etc.), social networking (members finding members), profiles, and enterprise security and control. The power of an Awareness community is in the unique way these four areas work together.

Awareness communities can feature a unique organizational construct called "neighborhoods",which are created and controlled by community administrators. Users can create their own organizational construct called "groups".