What's new in Communities?

This release contains features that are designed to make communities easier for you to use to share information.

What's new

The following features are new or updated for Communities in IBM Connections™.
  • Restricted but listed communities. When creating or editing communities, you can now designate restricted communities as "restricted but listed". This designation means that the community appears in the My Organization Communities view. People in your organization can then see the community's name, description, tags, and owners in the view. Non-members can click on the community and complete a form to request membership from the community's owners. The community is still restricted; non-members cannot open or see the community's content. The community's name, description, tags, and owners also appear in search results.
    To create a restricted community that people can discover and can request access to, select Let anyone in my organization see the community's title, description, tags, and owners. when you create or edit a community.
    Note: A subcommunity cannot be more visible than its parent. Therefore, if a parent community does not have Let anyone in my organization see the community's title, description, tags, and owners. selected, then the subcommunity cannot have this set either.
  • The Rich Content app (also known as the Rich text widget) is a new app in Connections 5.5. Use this app to create rich content pages in your community. Rich content pages support text, links, and images.
    Note: The Rich Content app needs some additional configuration to enable it, refer your administrator to the following topic:http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYGQH_5.5.0/admin/install/t_inst_enable_anonymous_access_for_rte.html.
  • The Public Communities view is renamed to My Organization Communities. In addition, your administrator can replace My Organization with the name of your company.
  • Move communities to where you want them to be.

    You can now organize your communities to better reflect your organization's goals. For example, you can move stand-alone communities to be subcommunities of a top-level, parent community. Similarly, you can move a subcommunity to make it a top-level community. You can also move a subcommunity from one parent community to another.

  • Dynamic community navigation in Connections. To make better use of space, the community navigation is improved. Click Overview in the navigation bar to display or hide community apps. Any subcommunities are displayed or hidden in the same way.
  • You can now change the positioning of community apps on the Overview page, simply select an app, and drag it into another layout area. If the target area cannot display the app, an error message is shown.
  • Use the new Change Layouts option to configure the Community overview page as follows:
    • Three column (default)
    • Two column
    • Three column with a banner
  • In this release, you can customize apps by renaming them. In previous releases, only some apps could be renamed. In Connections, all apps can be renamed.
  • In this release, community owners can change the community's mail privileges so that members can either:
    • Email the entire community
    • Email owners only
    • Cannot email others
  • You can now edit the community description field, using the Actions menu on the Overview page.
  • In Connections, you can export community events to an external calendar as an .ics file. You can then open the event in another application's calendar, such as IBM® Domino®. .ics is a calendar file format that is used by many email and calendar programs to share calendar information.
  • Library files can now be viewed with the new file viewer.
  • Media gallery documentation is now removed. Support for media gallery was removed from IBM Connections 5.0. Media gallery documentation is now removed from the Connections release.