Microsoft Community Bar Help
The Community Bar installer can be found
here.
To open the Community Bar, run Internet explorer and click on the Community Bar
icon in the toolbar:
You can also run it by going to the view menu, choosing
"Explorer Bar", and then clicking on "Microsoft Community Bar".
You can close the Community Bar by clicking the "X" in the upper right corner,
or by clicking the Community Bar icon on the toolbar again. The Community Bar is not
informed of any browsing activity while it is closed, so we suggest temporarily closing
the Community Bar when visiting sensitive web pages.
When you first run the Community Bar, you will be asked for your login information. Enter
your username and password for TheWorkingNetwork.com.
If you do not have one already, you can
Create a new user account there.
You may log in on multiple machines with the same account. Each machine "remembers"
that you've logged in. If you log out by clicking the logout link at the bottom of the Community Bar,
you will be logged out of all machines.
Note, you will be asked to log in again if you clear your cookies.
Once you have logged on, your Community Bar should display a Notes, Tags, Inlinks, and Ratings
panel (each of these panels has its own functionality, described in later sections. Here, we
describe the basic use of the Community Bar):
The Community Bar is simply a container for Community Bar panels. Each panel performs a specific
function. For instance, the Notes panel allows you to leave notes on a Web page. As you browse
around the Web, the panels update their content to reflect the fact that you are on a new page.
You can collapse a panel by clicking on its title bar. You can resize panels by dragging the
line at their bottom. You can also resize the entire Community Bar by dragging its border
on its right hand side.
To add or remove panels, click the Settings link at the bottom of the Community Bar.
To change your settings, click the Settings link at the bottom of
the Community Bar. You will see a listing of all the core panels included with the Community
Bar. To add a panel to your Community Bar, check the box in the "Enabled" column
for that panel.
You can also use this page to manage any custom panels you have added to your Community Bar.
Third-Party panels are panels written by someone other than Microsoft. They provide additional
functionality and are a great way to extend the power of your Community Bar.
To add a third party panel to your Community Bar, usually you will
be given a URL which adds it automatically. You can also
manually add the third party panel to your Community Bar using the "Custom panel" section
of the Settings page. Please read our Privacy Statement carefully to
understand the privacy implications of adding a third party panel to your Community Bar.
(If you are a developer, learn how to create and share custom panels by reading
the Community Bar Panel API documentation.)
The Notes panel allows you to leave notes on pages, and see notes left by others. When you
are on a page, the notes for that page (and entire domain) appear in the Notes panel automatically.
To leave a note, click the "New" button, or just start typing your note in the
panel header. You should see something like this:
You are given two options when creating a new note:
- Attach To:You may choose to attach your note to the page you are currently looking at, or to the entire
site. If you attach it to the site, it will appear for all pages on the current site. For such
notes, be sure the content of the note is relevant to the entire site, not just the page you
were annotating.
Viewable by:You may choose whether your note is viewable by everyone, or
just yourself (Note, although notes to yourself are not shown to other users, they are stored
on Microsoft's servers so that you may view such notes on any machine you have installed the
Community Bar on).
To save the note, click "Save". If you have made your note visible to everyone,
it will now appear on everyone's Community Bar when they visit the same page (or site).
They will see the note, as well as your username.
You can delete one of your own notes by clicking the "Delete" link. (this link only appears
for notes you have authored).
The Tags panel allows you to bookmark a page using a short (one or two word) description.
Use this panel to indicate the subject of pages that you think are generally useful to the community.
When you visit a page, you can see what tags other Community Bar members have assigned to
the page. By clicking on a tag, you can see what other pages were tagged with the same
terms. To create a new tag, simply enter the tag term(s) in the textbox on the panel header
and hit "enter". The tag will be added to the list of tags for the page, and seen
by everyone who visits that page.
The Inlinks panel allows you to see what pages link to the current page. You can use this to
find who references an article you are reading, find blog entries that refer to the page you
are on, etc. Clicking on one if the inlinks takes you to that page, allowing you to
essentially traverse the Web backwards.
The Ratings panel allows you to rate pages based on their quality. For example, a spam page
should receive a very low rating, and a page that you found useful should receive a high rating.
The panel graphically shows the ratings provided by other users for the same page.