Ben Chapman:
We are deploying Liferay and I'm trying to decide between organizations and communities for the staff portions of the organization.
It's a typical scenario that organizations are used to represent a corporate heirarchy. Each employee belongs in one and only one organization (even if the organization has parent orgs).
Communities, however, do not have the heirarchies. Users are typically able to add/remove themselves from a community, and users can be members of multiple communities.
You can actually implement both, using the orgs to represent the corp heirarchy but communities of users with shared interests.
The biggest determinant (at least for me) is the permissions to access resources. Since users can add themselves to communities (typically), any secured resource that you given access to the community is inherently insecure when people can come and go as they please; Orgs do not let users add/remove themselves, so a secured resource for an org is inherently more secure than the community scenario.
