One of the first things you'll likely do when setting up Jive SBS is create spaces
and sub-spaces in hierarchies that reflect your group's functional areas or interests.
You'll likely find that you're defining spaces and their sub-spaces in ways that reflect
how people organize themselves outside of Jive SBS. For example, at a
high level, spaces could reflect organizational divisions. 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 top-level Sales space to
reflect the sales department, 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 the following:
- 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. You can also expose portions of
the space to external partners using Jive SBS's
permissions system.
- When defining spaces and sub-spaces, be sure to 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 start at first. Once 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.
- Note that content can't be shared and tagged between discrete spaces -- only
within the space in which it's created. Use a space to group multiple concepts
or functional areas; use a category to group together discrete concepts within
a space.
- 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 dropdown lists) that display the names of
all the spaces.
- Content from a sub-space isn't found when searching the space that contains it,
nor is the contained content listed on the All Content page. You can show
content for each sub-space with a widget when you customize the space's Overview
page. You can also use the Recent Activity widget to show recent activity for
all sub-spaces.