We struggled with this nomenclature in our environment.  After many user questions as to the differences between the two, I bit the bullet and substituted all instances o the term 'Space' to 'Community' or 'Communities'.  I think that now for the users, it is very clear that there is only one content structure and way of thinking of containers (if you conveniently forget the questions regarding 'Groups' and 'Projects').

Actually, using the vernacular of SBS, Projects do not generally reside in 'Places'.  They can only reside in Spaces (Communities in our environment).  If the reason for Projects to reside in Spaces is purely for cascading permissions, then I'm uncertain why they could not exist in Groups as well, speaking from a purely logical perspective, because Groups have similar permissioning capabilities.  That said, this is one of the puzzlers that our users have when being introduced to the environment.  They say, "why can't Communities have Groups?", "Why can't groups have sub-groups?", "Why can't our Group have a Project?"

It falls on the community manager to smooth out the rough implementation (the tool) by detailing a compelling use narrative (the practice).

Hi Yoshi,

Now that 4.0 has been publicly released, I wanted to follow up on Greg's last comment: with 4.0, you can now have Projects in Groups. In addition, we've introduced the new concept of Categories. Most of the time that we heard about sub-groups, people were not looking to change membership or permissions, but rather to better organize information. Categories work like folders to organize information in a place, effectively providing those sub-groupings without adding another permissions layer. This also has the benefit of letting you put content into multiple categories and, if a category changes or is no longer useful, you can modify or delete it without affecting the related content. I hope this helps!

Back to the original question, I am curious: if we were to use only the term Communities or Spaces for both public and employee communities, which one (or neither) do you think best describes these places?

Thanks,

Olivia

WE use communities and sub-communities. It took me several months to become comfortable with your vernacular of spaces vs communities. In fact, in reading this thread, I now know for the first time that spaces were for employee facing comms, while communities were for public facing comms.  but why in the world would you have 2 different naming schemes for the same thing?