System and method for providing notifications in a communities framework

A community enables user membership in a distributed collaborative computing environment. The members can have access to a repository of resources. Dynamic notifications between client and server can be provided. A member can be logged onto a client which pings the server computer through no interaction of the user. A notifications manager located on the server can retrieve updates available for the member in response to each ping. The notifications manager can look up any changes to the resources that the member has subscribed to. The server can subsequently notify the client of the available updates. The client's user interface can be updated to reflect the relevant changes. A dynamic and granular interaction between the server and the client can be enabled instead of updating the entire portal page. Each ping can carry an id of the member and community, which the server can use to determine the relevant updates.