One of the first things you'll do when setting up your community is create spaces
and sub-spaces in a hierarchy that reflect your organization's functional areas or
interests.
A good way to design spaces is to match how your company organizes functional teams and
projects. For example, at a high level, spaces could reflect organizational divisions,
such as Human Resources and Marketing.
Sub-spaces are likely to reflect organizational subdivisions, but they could also mirror
areas of interest or other more informal boundaries. For example, you might create a
Sales space for the Sales department, and then create sub-spaces such as Channel
Sales, Business Development, and Direct Sales. Other criteria by which to define
sub-spaces include functional area and topic.
As you define spaces, keep in mind:
- Before adding spaces to the system, you might want to collect information about
roles for those who will have special permissions — such as blog authors,
moderators, and so on. As you create spaces and sub-spaces using the Admin
Console, you'll be prompted for this information.
- Each space and sub-space can have different sets of permissions, so you can
control access and capabilities within a space.
- When defining spaces and sub-spaces, be sure that the divisions and hierarchy
are intuitive to people. You might start by looking at how people and teams are
organized. You could also create a suggested space/sub-space hierarchy and get
user feedback on it.
- Create a general, high-level hierarchy to get started. After people are
involved, they'll refine the categorization using tags. As a general rule,
larger numbers of spaces and sub-spaces tend to create silos and reduce the
power of tagging.
- Define spaces with the role of tags in mind. Spaces organize content, but over
time tags will grow to constitute virtual groups to organize content also. As
people apply tags to content, for example, a tag such as "personal" might come
to mean "a blog post or document that isn't connected with the company's
business." In other words, this is probably a better way to categorize
"personal" posts than a "Personal" sub-space would be.
- For usability reasons, avoid creating a large number of spaces. With a large
number of spaces, certain elements in the user interface can become difficult to
use. These include lists (including drop-down lists) that display the names of
all the spaces.