MS Communities – Managing a User Group Part 2

Jared Johnson, 01 March 2012

In part one of this blog I described the use of the first two tabs of the User Group management interface – General and Members, now I will introduce the remaining two tabs – Roles and Forums.

The roles tab is where you can manage who is on the list of group admins. Group admins as well as being able to access this management page can also post news articles and events and are displayed on the About us page and the Group administrators panel.

This is shown after clicking on the Roles tab, click on the edit button (the green pencil) to proceed to the next screen.

After clicking the edit button this screen is displayed, the fields in the general tab are best left as their default values, especially the “Can manage the group” checkbox. If this is unchecked the group admin will lose access to this management page.

To manage the group admin click the Users tab on this screen.

Accessing the users tab displays this screen. All of the group members who have been given the role of group admin are displayed here. Members can have their admin rights taken away by ticking the checkbox next to their name and clicking the Remove selected button.

To add a group member to the list of group admins click the Add users button. This will pop up a new window displaying a list of all the members in the group, with the option to search by username at the top of the page. Press the checkbox by the name of the users you want to add as an group admin and then press the OK button.

The forums tab is where all the features of the group forums can be configured and sub forums created and deleted.

Opening the Forums tab will show this screen, click the Edit button (green pencil) to open the forum for editing.

This screen displays all of the sub forums. Each sub forum can be opened for editing by clicking the Edit button (green pencil), deleted via the Delete button (red cross) and display order changed (green arrows).

To add a new sub forum click the Add forum link.

Clicking the Add forum link opens this form. The Forum display name field is the name of the sub form that will be displayed to users; Description is the text that appears under the forum name. Having “Forum is moderated” means you can assign users to be able to moderate the forum without being admins themselves.

Clicking on the Edit button (green pencil) next to a sub forum opens it up for editing. The editing page has 5 tabs: Posts, General, Subscriptions, Moderators and Security.

From the post tab you can view all the topics and posts in a forum, and can moderate them by deleting and editing posts. Clicking on a post (speech bubble) in the left tree opens it in the right window.

The General tab allows you to change the settings that were set when the forum was created such as the Forum display name. It also has other advanced options.

From the subscriptions tab you can view all of the subscriptions people have made to the forum, and also directly add new ones.

From the moderators tab you can enable or disable the option for the forum to be moderated, and add or remove members from the moderators list.

The Security tab allows you to set what features of the forum can be done by different kinds of user, all users are any users to the site, Authenticated users are members of the mscommunities.co.nz website but not necessarily of your group, group members are members of the user group and authorized roles are the group admins.

With this information you should now be able to manage your user group effectively.