An essential part of the workday is communication. But from what we've learned from our customers, there’s still confusion around where to share knowledge or how to access the right information when it’s needed most. As we’re on a mission to simplify everything, so employees can unlock their ultimate digital work focus, we’re happy to share that we’re launching Communities as part of the Workspace 365 Hub.

Within the Communities you can create a place for connection, collaboration, sharing insights and celebrating milestones. It’s a place that will become your cultural engine, innovation hub, and support system. All from one place.

The Hub Communities are available to customers participating in our Beta Programme.

Click here for more information on our Beta Programme.

The Hub Communities are available from Workspace 4.25 in the Beta Programme. For hosted partners, Workspace 4.25 will be available from 9 May. Self-hosted partners can download this upgrade from 13 May. They will receive an email once the download is available.

New Communities can be created by Workspace 365 admins, as well as removing existing Communities. In a later phase, this functionality will be extended to allow other users to receive permissions to create Communities.

If someone is an author in a Community, he or she can create posts. Workspace 365 admins can decide who is an author in a Community by assigning that role to users. In a later phase, it will also be possible for other users to receive permissions to assign someone as an author.

If someone is a member of a Community, they can only read posts and respond to them. They can also receive notifications from this Community. Admins can add users as a member to a Community. Besides that, a user can decide for themselves which Communities to join, but it is not a requirement to be able to respond to posts in open Communities.

Once a user is a member of a Community, that 'joined' Community will appear in the left sidebar.

Users who are not a member of a Community, can still access that Community via "Discover communities" and view and reply to messages. But the activity will not be shown in "My feed" or "my notifications".

As mentioned above, a user can join all Communities. Joining works as follows:

Go to Hub --> Communities --> Discover communities.

In the screen "Discover communities" you will now see an overview of all Communities you joined. If you are not yet a member of a Community, you can join by clicking '+ join' (see screenshot below).

Note: the 'All company' Community is included by default. All users are automatically members of this Community. Users can't 'unjoin' the 'All company' Community.

Note: As mentioned above, you do not need to be a member of a Community to be able to view or respond to posts.

Under the 'My feed' tab, you will see a chronological overview of posts from all the Communities you are a member of. See the screenshot below:

A post is placed in one Community. You can add a text, one image and links. Users can post a comment to a post or react to other comments.

You can create a post in two ways:

In My Feed, you select the Community in which you want to place the post from the drop down menu. You can only select Communities in which you are an author (see screenshot).

You can also post directly from a Community. Go to the Community where you want to post via the tab on the left or via the "Discover communities" tab.

Although Communities are primarily designed to encourage interaction between users, a Community can also be used for sending information.

In that case, assign one author (or a limited number) to a Community and encourage users to become members of that Community.

In many cases, it is desirable for authors to also be members of a Community. Therefore, after assigning authors, you can choose to make all of them members of the relevant Community in one go, see screenshot.