Join a Group

Joining and participating in a group helps you become involved in your community.

A group is a place for you to connect with people who share an interest. Groups can be about anything from human resources informational groups to after-work sports groups. People join a group to participate in discussions, keep track of the group-related documents, and remain aware of the group's activities.

There are four types of groups. Depending on how your community is set up, your group options are slightly different. For more detail, see Types of Groups. You can browse most of the groups in your community from the Places page and find groups of interest: groups anyone can fully participate in are called Public or Open. Other groups require you to be a member to participate in certain ways. Depending on how a group is set up, you may have to join it before you can collaborate on content in that group. Some groups require you to be a member in order to see any activity or content in a group, and still others are invisible unless you get an invitation.

To find some groups to participate in:

In the main navigation, click your avatar and then Your Places.
Select All in the left pane.
Use the filtering options to find groups that interest you. For example, type accounting in the Filter by text area to find all accounting-related groups.
Select Groups to see a list of all the groups in your community.

Select a group type in the All group types drop-down list to view only those groups. You see the following options for group type:

Option	Description
Open Group	Click through and participate, or follow the group to see updates from the group in your streams. (Public groups don't have members.)
Members Only	Click through and participate. You can reply or comment and create some kinds of content without joining the group, but for full authorship rights, you need to be approved for membership by a member of the group.
Private	Request membership if you want to see what's in a private group. The group owner must approve your membership.
Secret	You must be invited to this group in order to see it.

Click the group title to open and look at the group.
Restriction: You won't see any secret groups here because can't see them unless you are invited to the group.

If you click on a private group, you can Ask to join this group.

To join the other types of groups that require membership, go to the group's landing page, then go to Actions > Join group.