Hi

I'm putting together a proposal with my developer for a Joomla website integrated with civiCRM to meet the needs of a not for profit, member based organisation. I thought that Jomsocial could offer some really helpful functionality and enable members to communicate better with each other. In practise each member is automatically assigned a local group - who they can meet up with etc and many activities are organised around this group structure. I am a bit concerned that if we used Jomsocial as it is then members might be able to create lots of friend groups and confuse their current organisational structure. Is it possible to configure Jomsocial with different user types and with some types having the ability to create groups and some without that capacity? Alternatively I guess we would just ask members not to create 'area based' groups as these have already been created as private groups and they will be invited to 'their' assigned group .....

Also I read info on github from another developer that they'd managed to connect the events part of Jomsocial with that in civiCRM which is reassuring as we'll be looking to do the same and have civiCRM as our events management software - but it would be great if Jomsocial could draw on the events from civi to be used in users feeds. If my developer is unable to get this to happen, I'd look to switch off the events functionality bit of Jomsocial for users. Will that be possible?

Finally, I've read that you're now offering Jomsocial on a SaaS basis - with unlimited photos, videos etc. This is attractive to us as with this website we would have up to 6500 users and I'm slightly scared of exactly how much storage this will ultimately require if we host it ourselves. However as we'd be building a Joomla site with civiCRM as well, would it mean that Jomsocial on a SaaS basis would not be a practical option?

Thanks for your help.

Jamie

Hello Jamie

Let me try to answer your questions
First the groups.
As an admin, you will have the many posibilities to disable users to create groups. You can either globally disable all user to create new groups, or you can make a profiletype that wont be able to start new groups. Or even disable groups altogether

Same thing goes for events

As for storage, that really depends how big your site is, and how big file uploads you will have
If you limit the file size uploads to under 1mb you'll be just fine with only few gigabytes of hosting, but if you allow 1gb HD movie files upload, then you wont, its really a subjective thing that needs to be decided basing on your needs.