Libraries provide community members document management
capabilities to upload, manage, organize, and collaborate on community
files. A community can contain multiple libraries.
Attention: When the IBM® Connections
Content Manager add-on is deployed, community owners can create libraries
directly from a community using the Library widget. Community owners
can also link to existing libraries using the Linked Library widget
available in IBM Connections
3.0.1 and later. In this documentation, the libraries created directly
from a community using the Library widget are referred to as community
libraries. The libraries connected to a community using the
Linked Library widget 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.
Existing linked libraries from earlier versions of IBM 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 widget but unless
you have access to the linked library, you cannot see any content
in the library.
- If you remove the Linked Library widget from your community, the
linked library content is not deleted from the ECM server. You can
access the content by adding the Linked Library widget to your community
again and recreating the connection with the ECM server. If you remove
the Library widget 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.