Groups deliver an enhanced experience for Community members to engage around a common theme or purpose. Each group has its own configurable set of content types (forum, blog, knowledge base, ideas, and events) to organize content and communication.

This guide provides overview information about:

• Group membership types
• Search within groups
• Group management
• Group flood controls

You can imagine groups for everything from special interests within the community to focus groups to product launches and more. Groups can be visible and open to anyone in the Community, closed (requiring a request to join), or hidden (invisible to the public and accessible by invitation only).

Community Administrators can share group management with Community members by giving a member the Owner role, which enables the member to edit group details, manage membership requests and invitations, and assign and change group roles for members.

Members can discover and browse groups on the Group landing page:

The Group page provides quick access to the hub's info, contents, recent activity, and members.

Administrators and group Owners can perform most group management tasks directly in the Community UI without needing access to Community Settings. On the Create Group page, here is a quick look at group configuration options.

Note: The Boards section of the page appears to Community Administrators only. The ability to add group child places is dependent on the Add any community-supported boards permission, which is denied by default to the Owner, Curator, Inviter, and Member group roles.

Member management is performed in the Manage Members page. An Owner or Administrator can see a list of current members, edit a member's role, remove members from the group, view pending invitations, and accept and deny requests to join.

Other important group capabilities include fully-functional search and group subscriptions.

Group membership types

Every group has a membership type that controls access. A group can be:

• Open
• Closed
• Hidden

Important: Membership type and access are managed through Community permissions. There are no other Community Settings to control access. For example, a hidden group is hidden because non-members of that group have the See groups permission set to Deny.

Open groups

• All community members can browse and like all content, reply to posts, and comment on posts of the group.
• Group members can create new content and browse, reply, and comment on the post.
• The ability to see and join a group is governed by the access allowed to the container node. For example, an open group placed in a category with the See categories permission set to Deny cannot be joined by a member unless the member is assigned a role with See categories set to Grant.
• Ways to join:
• Join Group button on the Group page
• By invitation from a group Owner, Inviter, or an Administrator

Closed groups

• As with open groups, a closed group is visible only to community members with access to the category in the group lives. Group visibility is governed by the access set on the container node.
• Non-members do not have read or reply permissions for closed groups.
• Content in closed groups appears in search results to group members only.
• Non-members who try to access a closed group are directed to a page explaining that the group is closed and that the user must request access. The request to join is sent to group Owners via email.
• Members can create new content as well as browse and reply to existing content
• Ways to join:
• Join Group button on the Group page.
• By invitation from a group Owner, Curator, Inviter, or an Administrator.

Hidden groups

• Community members access Hidden groups either by invitation (by group Owner, Inviter, or an Administrator, or by being added to the group directly in Community Admin.
• Hidden groups are hidden from non-members in the Community UI and cannot be searched.
• Non-members attempting to access the URL to a hidden group’s page or child places are directed to an error page.

Search within groups

Content search within a group is fully-functional.

• All visitors can see content in open groups in community and place-level searches. Open group content is accessible to all. Content in closed groups is accessible only to group members.
• Hidden group content is searchable and accessible only by group members. Any relevant results in the community-wide search bar also surfaces content inside of groups to users who have permission to access it.
• Open and closed group nodes and child nodes appear in places search results to group members and non-members.
• Hidden group nodes appear in places search results to group members only.

Group management in the Community UI

The Community UI provides basic group management features:

• Create a group
• Delete a group
• Edit group details including group type, child board titles, and avatar
• Invite new members to the group
• Remove members from a group
• Manage group invitations and requests to join
• Manage group role assignments

Group management in Community Admin

Community Administrators can define Community Settings at the group container level, just as they can with other containers.

In the Manage Members page, Community Administrators can remove a member from a group, edit a member’s role within the group, and manage any pending invitations.

Group management by community members with Admin Permissions

A community member with the Edit groups and Edit groups in Community Settings permissions can access Community Settings from the Group page in the Community UI and perform group administration actions. The permission adds the Edit Group Settings option to the Group page Options menu.

These permissions are denied by default.

Important! Be very careful when granting these permissions. It is intended to enable trusted employees to perform group actions that cannot be performed in the Community UI. For example, you may grant this permission to a product manager who is running an Early Access program through a group so that the product manager can quickly add customers to the group. We strongly recommend against granting this permission to your customers.

Group flood controls

Group members can send up to 50 invitations in an hour and up to 100 invitations per day.