A scope is a means for partitioning data in a community, providing users with a certain view of the data. Every community has a scope called Global, which provides a total view of the data. Other scopes, if the administrator chooses to create them, will typically provide users with a view of some subset of the total data.

When a new community is created, the Global scope is automatically created and set as the default scope. Additional scopes only need to be created if there is a requirement to create and maintain data in the same community that is independent of other data. Examples of where additional scopes are useful are project-based data and organizational data.

Many organizations only need one scope. For these organizations, the Global scope is sufficient. When a community is upgraded from a version in which the concept of scopes did not exist, the data from that community is automatically placed in the Global scope.

Each scope can have its own set of classes, attributes, templates, organizations, and people. Scope names must be unique within a community. Certain list values (for example, responsibilities) must be unique to a scope. Users, through their assignments to roles, might have rights to access data in some scopes but not others.

Scopes can be in a hierarchical structure. For example, you might have a program scope that is made up of many smaller project scopes. The program scope is the parent scope and each project scope is a child of this parent scope. Attributes and classes that are defined in the parent scope can be inherited by a child scope.

All scopes are able to view and use data from the Global scope and any other parent scope. In order to access a scope, the user must belong to at least one role in each scope in the hierarchy.

When users log in to their community, they can choose which scopes they want to activate and which of these is to be the default. All new data is created within the default scope. Searches are conducted across all active scopes. When creating new data, the attributes and templates available to users are based on the default parent hierarchy, called the Default Visible Scope. As the data in a scope exists independently, it is possible that different scopes may assign the same code to different objects in the community.