Inviting people to community
As a community manager, you can invite both new members and external contributors to join the community. Informing people about the community site is rather simple: you provide them with a direct link to the site either from the community itself or by using any other communication channel.
On the community site, you can send invitations to people by using the Send Invites dialog box. If enabled for your community, you can invite people from outside the community to join. When you send an invitation, they receive an email with instructions on how they can set up their account in the community. For detailed steps, refer to the section below.
You can also send an invitation when creating a user account in the Admin Console or configure the system to automatically send invitations to self-registered users, as described in Creating user accounts and Configuring self-service user registration.
Community managers or users can invite external contributors to join the community. For more information, see Adding external contributors.
After receiving the invitation, people can join the community through methods such as self-registration or SSO. For more information, see the following sections: Managing access, Setting up LDAP and Active Directory, and Setting up Single Sign-On.
To invite people to join the community using the Send Invites dialog box:
- In the user interface, click People > Send Invites.
- This may be located under the Browse menu. Note that you won't see this option if your administrator has disabled the ability to invite people from outside.
-
In the Send Invites dialog box, enter the complete email addresses of the people you want to invite, separating them by commas.
When selecting people to invite, you can also do the following:
- To invite several people from your email address book or the user management system, browse contacts by clicking the browse icon. Select the people or groups of people you want to invite, and then click Add selected people.
- To invite people from an existing email list, export the list of addresses from your email application, then copy and paste it in. The addresses in the list must be comma-, space-, or semicolon-delimited.
-
If necessary, edit the message you want potential group members to see with their invitation or tailor it for your invitees.
-
Click Send Invitation.
The people you invite receive emails with the instructions to join the community.