The Landing offers a huge range of tools and facilties for you to share things with others, make connections with people, communicate, and form communities. This is a very brief overview of some of the main features, but is not comprehensive. Do feel free to explore the site and discover its many facilities.

The Landing is similar to systems like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning and other social networking systems, mixed in with other social things like blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, wikis and Twitter (microblogging). Perhaps its most distinctive feature is the control that it gives to you over who can view (and perhpas edit) content you contribute to the Landing. Almost everything you do or add here can be as private or as public as you wish. For example, if you want the world to see your blog post or photo, you can make it public. If you want it to only be seen by a specific group or even an individual, you can very easily do so by selecting them from a list. If you want it to be completely private (say, if it is a work in progress or you just want a place to store your photos) that's fine too. The default setting is that anyone logged into this site can see it - in other words, only members of the AU extended community, including students, alumni, faculty and other staff will be able to see what you share. This makes it a much safer space than typical social networking sites, with the reassurance that anything that people share here can be reliably attributed to an individual. The only exception to this is comments made on things that have been shared with the public: anyone can comment on such posts, but the owner of that content has to approve any comments they make, so you can simply ignore or delete any that you don't want. We also have a measure of spam prevention on such posts that should prevent most robot spammers from interrupting your day.

The top bar

The top toolbar gives you quick access to many of the site tools and faciltiies, including:

The home page for the site

Clicking the Landing logo or the title 'Athabasca Landing' at the top of the page will take you to the site home page, which contains much up to date information and links to what others have been doing across the whole site (only those things they have made available to the public or logged in users, of course!)

Your Profile page

Next to the Landing logo on the top bar is your profile image, which is a link to your own profile page, where you can change what others see about you and the layout and content of your profile page. This is rather like your home page on the site. You can choose how much or how little different people and groups can see, from the whole world down to a single individual. You can configure how it looks to other people and what it contains using a very simple drag and drop interface. Note that your image and name are the only things that you cannot set permissions on and that these are visible to the whole world - if you don't want that, simply choose a different image (or none if you prefer) and make your name less identifiable (configured in 'My Account').

The Dashboard

This is your private space on the site that you can configure how you wish to contain the things that you want to pay attention to or that you use most often. Like the Profile, it has an easy drag and drop interface. You are the only one who can see your dashboard: it is a space for you to organise things on the Landing the way you want. Widgets, many of them highly configurable, can be used to display particular groups, people, content tagged with things that interest you, and so on.

Tools

The tools menu is a drop-down list that takes you to the main functions of the site. You'll probably find yourself using this quite a lot as, for each tool, the menu lets you see what others have done as well as letting you add your own things. The tools include:

• Activity: shows a view of the river of activity of the site. You can only see things that people have allowed you to see, of course, not everything that is happening on the site.
• Blogs: see (and maybe comment on) other people's blogs and write your own
• Bookmarks: see (and maybe comment on) other people's shared bookmarks (links to web pages on this site and others) and share your own
• Event calendar: see events that may be of interest and add/share your own
• Files: see (and maybe comment on) files others have shared and share your own. Some file types are displayed in appropriate ways - images can be viewed as a gallery or slideshow, audio can be played using a built-in audio player (Flash-based - not useful if you are viewing them with an iPhone, iPad or most Android tablets and phones). You can organise files into folders if you like, to make it easier to find sets of them.
• Your circles: see what people you are following (AKA your 'friends') have been doing, group them into Circles so that you can exercise fine-grained control over whose activity you see, and who can see what you share.
• Groups: see the groups that are available to join, or create and manage your own. Groups can share files, have discussions, share bookmarks, share a single blog, write web pages, conduct polls, share calendars and much more. Some are free to join, others require permission from their owner and some are by invitation only. If you create a group, you decide how people can join it and who can see it, from the whole world to a small number of people or even just you. If you leave the group open, anyone who is logged in can join it if they like. If not, you have to explicitly let them in. To invite someone to a closed group you have to follow them first or, alternatively, inform them in some other way that the group exists so that they can request membership (that you will have to approve). 
• Members: see all the people on the system, with links to their profiles. When you look at their profiles, you can choose to follow them, which makes it easier to send messages, find out what they are doing and so on (if they allow you to do so).
• Wikis: see (and maybe comment on or, if they let you, make changes to) web pages others have written, and write your own. This is very like a wiki in most ways. If people make changes to your pages that you don't like, it is very easy to undo those changes.
• Photos: see photo albums others have shared and make and share your own. 
• Polls: see polls others have set and maybe set your own polls, quizzes and questionnaires.
• The wire: see what others have posted, or write your own wire posts. Always public, a maximum of 140 characters in length so they are short and succinct. Very much like Twitter (and, if you have a Twitter account, you can send your Wire posts to it automatically)

Messages

The icon that looks like an envelope lets you see messages others have sent to you and send messages to others that you know (people you are following and groups). It will inform you if you have messages waiting by turning red. You can adjust your settings in 'My Account' to choose whether you receive notifications in the first place and, if so, who from and in what format (only through the Landing and/or via email)

My Account

This option lets you change how the system behaves, such as whether you receive notification emails or the user name and password it uses to get or send information to or from elsewhere (such as Twitter) as well as some interface tweaks.

Search

Does what it says! It shows results grouped according to the tools etc that relate to them (e.g. photos, blog posts, groups, etc) so you can narrow your search to specific people, groups or kinds of post. The search is not very sophisticated - it will find posts that contain any of the words you enter in the search term.

This is a public page. Please note that any comments you add to the page will also be visible to the world.