We get a lot of questions about the pages and spaces and when to use what. I'd like to go over some of the benefits of each and best practices pulled from our customer experiences, but first, let's go over the differences between them.

Pages are places to collect and present content. On a page, you can insert any of our widgets, and pull information from anywhere in your Igloo community for easy access to your members.

Spaces are like smaller communities within your intranet, like a state or province within a country. Spaces can have their own governing bodies, exclusive content channels, branding and, as it happens, pages.

Pages are best used as landing sites within your community. These are places where your members will frequently go to gather information, and to be directed to other places they may wish to explore, both internally and externally. They are the train stations of the Igloo community, metaphorical maps, newsstand, schedule and loudspeaker included.

Pages also function as places to collect several channels of the same kind. If you have a dozen blog feeds, rather than having them all be separate navigation items, you can make them children of a page, which can then display the content and allow new posts to be made, based on the permissions of the member accessing that page.

Spaces are typically created when a subgroup of people need their own area in which to collaborate. This is particularly true when that group wants to be able to manage their own area. Some examples of common applications for spaces include project teams, departments, social groups, subsidiaries, and partners.

Spaces can have their own administrators, who have access to the space administration panel. Through here, they can manage members, create and reorganize channels and pages within their space, and even change their header and footer relative to the rest of the site.

In the end, spaces are places where groups of people gather and collaborate in private: the pubs, clubhouses, and secret hideouts of the Igloo world. Pages are the coffee shops, newsstands, and bulletin boards within your community; the places that people pass through in their daily routine.