Using libraries

Libraries provide community members document management capabilities to upload, manage, organize, and collaborate on community files. A community can contain multiple libraries.

In IBM Connections™ CR2, you can use the Gallery app to highlight the contents of a Library folder in the Community Overview page, For more information, see Working with galleries. In Connections CR2 external users External users.

can also view and create content in Connections Content Manager libraries.

Note: If you connect a Linked Library widget to a Library that does not reside on the primary FileNet server associated with your IBM Connections installation, thumbnails is not available. The impacts of this are as follows:

The preview is disabled in the grid view.
in each thumbnail, the Preview/View icon does not appear.
The "Preview" button does not appear in the Document Summary page.

Linked Libraries allow you to connect a community to an existing Library (or FileNet® teamspace). Linked Libraries allow a community to reference the content of libraries and teamspaces owned by another community or even owned by apps outside of Connections such as IBM® Content Navigator. In contrast to a community library, the access control of a Linked Library is not controlled by the community membership.

Attention: When the IBM Connections Content Manager add-on is deployed, community owners can create libraries directly from a community using the Library app. Community owners can also link to existing libraries using the Linked Library app available in IBM Connections 3.0.1 and later. In this documentation, the libraries created directly from a community using the Library app are referred to as community libraries. The libraries connected to a community using the Linked Library app are referred to as linked libraries. Community libraries are currently only supported in IBM FileNet Content Manager deployments. Linked libraries are supported by IBM FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Manager.

Community libraries provide owners and members with the following content management capabilities and enhanced social features:

Checkin and checkout. Members can check out files and edit them using private drafts. Checked out files are locked to prevent other users from making updates at the same time.
Version control. Members can see who has updated content at a glance and roll back to previous file versions if there is a need to recover older content.
File organization. Members can copy, move, and delete files, and use Trash view functionality to manage deleted content.
Draft review. Members can collaborate on shared files and send them through an established review cycle to obtain the approval of selected members of the community.
Sharing. Community owners can set file-level access to the library, giving them tighter control over who can edit content.
Social content management. Members can interact with content in the community library in a social and dynamic way. For example, they can use tags to categorize content and improve file retrieval, and like files to recommend them to fellow members. Members can also track file updates in the community activity stream, follow files, comment on files, and see who has downloaded files.
Document types and properties. Community owners can set the default document type for a library, allowing them to specify a defined set of information and properties for library files.
@Mention other users in comments on documents in libraries.
Note: You can only use @mentions when editing a comment in linked libraries that use the same FileNet server that is used for libraries created by Connections

Existing linked libraries from earlier versions of Connections can also leverage many of the content management capabilities and enhanced social features provided by community libraries, depending on the deployment specification. Where there are limitations for specific linked library deployments, these are noted in this help.

Notes:

Access to linked libraries is managed on the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) server unlike community libraries, where the access is managed from the community. Access to a linked library does not include the community owners and members groups, so having access to a community does not necessarily mean that you have access to its linked libraries. You can see the Linked Library app but unless you have access to the linked library, you cannot see any content in the library.
If you remove the Linked Library app from your community, the linked library content is not deleted from the ECM server. You can access the content by adding the Linked Library app to your community again and recreating the connection with the ECM server. If you remove the Library app from your community, the associated library content is permanently removed from your community and cannot be retrieved.
You can search for files in community libraries, however, searching in linked libraries is disabled by default. If search is enabled for linked libraries, a Linked Libraries tab is available in your Communities search results. Linked library search results display all matching files in the library. The search results do not include any social features, such as tagging, or document type information. When you click a search result, you are taken to a generic landing page that is outside the scope of a community. When a linked library is connected to a subfolder of a library, the search results are scoped to the library rather than to the folder.