Searching or browsing for communities

You can search or browse for communities that are of interest to you.

About this task

You can use a number of ways to find communities that interest you and connect with them. For example, you can search on particular keywords, or you can browse to see what communities interest you.
Note: Search finds community names based on an exact match or a wildcard query. For example, if you have a community that is named "HumanResourcesDepartment" and you search on "resources", the community "HumanResourcesDepartment" is not found. However, if you amend the search to "HumanResourcesDepartment" or "Human*", the community "HumanResourcesDepartment" is found.

Tags are a handy way to search for a community. For example, if you are interested in photography, search for a photography tag to find all communities that use that tag. When you are creating a community, remember to include relevant tags to indicate the purpose of the community and make it easier for others to find.

Procedure

You can search or browse for a community in the following ways.
  • Search for a keyword that displays in a community's name, description, or tags:
    1. Enter a word that you want to search for in the Search field.
    2. Specify whether you want to search all communities or your own communities by clicking the Down arrow and making a selection.
    3. Click the search Search icon icon.
  • Search for a community by tags by taking the following actions:
    • Click a tag in the tag cloud to find communities that use that tag.
    • Find a community in the view that interests you. Then, to find other communities that use that tag, click one of the tags that are associated with the community.
  • Browse for a community, take the following steps:
    1. From the Overview page, click My Organization Communities to display all the public and moderated communities in your organization. If community owners mark their communities as listed but restricted, these communities also appear in My Organization Communities; you can apply to the community owners to join these communities. Use the options available from the side navigation bar to display these community categories:
      • The communities that you own
      • The communities to which you belong
      • The communities that you are following
      • The communities that you are invited to join
      You can view a description of each community, the number of members, the date it was last updated, the name of the person who last updated it, and its associated tags.
    2. Use the Sort by options to order the list by most recently updated, most popular, or alphabetically.
  • Find out what other communities a community member belongs to:
      • If your deployment includes the Profiles app, then clicking the name of a community member displays the profile for that person. Hover your cursor over the person's name and click the link to view their business card. When you click Communities in the business card, a list of all the public communities to which that person belongs is displayed.
      • If your deployment does not include the Profiles app, then clicking the community member's name displays a list of all the public communities to which that person belongs.
    • Click the community name to open it.