Guide to Communities | User Support | DMI

Creating Communities is an easy, guided process that involves setting preferences, customizing appearance, and choosing the apps you want to use within your community. To begin creating your new community, click the Create drop-down window in the top-right corner of any public DMI page. From there, select “Create a new community.”

Community creation is broken down into three major steps, each with their own minor steps and settings.

1. Community name and info: Where you describe the purpose of the community and customize access permissions.
2. Upload your community photo: Where you choose the image that will be associated with your community.
3. Community application settings: Where you decide what apps you want to be visible on the community’s sidebar.

This step establishes the overall purpose of the community. By filling in the “community title” and “community description” fields, you let everyone know what the community aims to accomplish. When you finish creating the community, this information can be found in the Info app on the sidebar.

The most important part of Step 1 involves choosing the settings for visibility and how to handle people wanting to join the community. "Type of community" determines how coworkers can view this community. There are three types of communities.

• Public community – Users with permissions to see the list of public communities can quickly discover these communities and decide whether they would like to access them
• Private community – Only invited coworkers can join these community
• Isolated – A unique form of community for users who will only have access to a single (or single set) of communities and will not be able to interact with members who are not members of their designated communities

If a community is public, everyone who has access to communities can find it whenever they like. The "Moderate user registration" setting determines whether a request to join is automatically approved, or if they need to be approved by a community moderator. Choose the settings that best serve each community’s purpose.

Know that you can change these settings at any time by clicking the manage community button below the community’s title on its homepage.

This step allows you to select the image that will serve as your community’s logo. To select the image you want, simply click “Upload a file” and search your folders for the image. DMI supports BMP, PNG, GIF, JPEG, and JPG file types.

For best results when choosing an image keep in mind that square images (width close to that of height) work best for the thumbnails created in the Communities header menu dropdown.

This final step allows you to choose the applications and content types that will appear on the community’s sidebar. These apps serve as communication tools for members of the community, allowing them to discuss ideas and share information.

Each field has a “yes” or “no” option. Know that you can change these settings and add new apps at any time using manage community.

• Articles
• Blogs
• Events
• File
• Forums
• Photos
• Video
• Wiki
• Cases
• Ideas
• Task Manager

If a content type has been disabled for the entire community it will not appear as an option for the community.

When you’re satisfied with your settings, click “Save Settings” and your community will be generated.

4. Creating a Sub Community

Creating a sub community follows the exact same steps as creating any other community, except that instead of starting from the Create menu you start from the original community it’s attached to (its parent community). A sub community allows you to create hierarchy within a parent community. You can create sub communities for smaller teams within your larger community community, or create a sub community that is wholly dedicated to one particular task.

To create a sub community, go to the community that you wish to become the parent community for this new sub community. From there, click the “Create a sub community” tab near the bottom of the community sidebar (if you have permission to do so). You’ll be taken through the same three steps listed above, with only one new addition.

In Step 1, you’ll see a “Set parent community” field. This field cannot be adjusted during the creation process, it is solely determined by which community you were looking at before you started creating the sub community. But after it has been created it can be moved to another community you have permissions to by accessing the sub-community's Community Settings. 

Once you create your sub community, you can use the Communities drop-down menu to go directly to the sub community, just as you would with any other community. The sub-community will also appear as a "sub-community" listed on the activty stream landing page for a community.

5. Copying A Community

If you want to create a new community, but you don’t to leverage the settings already in place for an existing community, you can duplicate an existing community by using the “Copy this community” tab on the community sidebar (assuming you have permission to do so). The new community you create with this method will have the exact same internal settings (permissions, applications, etc.) as the original community, but it will be clean of all posts and other activity. This is a quick and easy way of creating a new community without adjusting internal settings.

When you click “Copy this community,” an overlay window will appear. Simply give the new community a title and description. Then, decide if you want to bring the members of the original community to the new one. Once you’re done, click “Copy community” and create your new community.