Benefits of communities:-

   

                  Brief description of benefits of SharePoint communities:

·         Work Together the Way You Want

With SharePoint 2010 Communities, people can work together the way they want using a full set of collaboration tools—from wikis to workflows and team sites to tagging. A single, flexible platform makes it easy to manage these tools and design the right collaborative experiences for different business needs

·         Rely on a Secure Collaboration Platform

The SharePoint 2010 collaboration platform is secure, easy to manage, and scalable. People can work together more safely with the platform’s granular security and privacy controls, centralized policy setting, and detailed reporting and analysis.

·         Extend the Value of Your Community Solutions

SharePoint 2010 provides a single collaboration platform that lets people use the tools and applications they already know. SharePoint 2010:

• Works seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft Business Productivity infrastructure, including Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics.

• Adheres to open standards, so people can use third-party applications and systems.

• Uses Business Connectivity Services to surface information from other business applications.

Related feature of SharePoint communities

·         Tags

Classify and organize large amounts of information in your company by applying tags. Use standardized taxonomy tags defined by the organization and informal social tags defined by employees.

·         Blogs

Use the new SharePoint Ribbon to format blog text and easily upload images.

·         Colleague Suggestions

Keep your colleague network current with an automated service that suggests colleagues based on your reporting structure, communities membership, e-mail distribution lists, Office Communicator contact lists, and analysis of most common Office Outlook e-mail recipients.

·         My Content

Centrally store and manage your documents, favorite links, personal blog, and wiki pages on the My Content section of your My Site. Customize your pages and set access and permission levels for any content in the section.

·         Organization Browser

Navigate your organizational structure to see managers, peers, and direct reports.

·         Photos and Presence

Help people recognize each other with photos. Use presence to email, IM, or call someone with the click of a button.

·         Ratings

Rate SharePoint pages, lists, libraries, and individual documents with a five-star rating system.

·         Recent Activities

Let people know what you're up to with the Recent Activities feed on your profile page.

·         Wikis

Create pages that combine the ease of wikis with the functionality of Web Parts.