Relationships can be used to provide users with buddy lists that can be used to expose contact information, online activity etc. A relationship is established through an invitation process. A user invites another user to become his buddy. The relationship is only fully established when the other user accepts the invitation. The other user can also choose to reject the invitation in which case the state is reverted back to before the first invitation.
All services can specialize their offerings according to the relationship between the users.
After CCS is installed and the system runs, most administrative tasks are performed through a web interface. Setting up a domain is done from an external web application. The domain setup involves defining role mapping between group roles and service roles, setting up the services that should be available within the domain, and defining users that should be domain administrators. Once a domain is setup, users defined as administrators in the domain setup usually do all additional administration from inside CCS itself. These users have administrative privileges everywhere in the community system and thus they are able to modify the system in any relevant way.