Well, a while has gone by since the launch of the new Communities on the Jive platform. It's been a new experience for all of us, especially for us on the board as many of the functions we used to carry out are much easier. As I'm sure you have noticed there are many changes with the new platform. Here are some of the things I've noticed that are a major improvement to the old system:
- Content
Jive is a system much like Facebook. This frees up some of the constraints that we had in the old system, which was based on the antiquated bulletin board system. Now all content can coexist on the community regardless of type. This has huge implications for Ideas since Ideas are now treated the exact same way as any other piece of content. Here are the ways the old content types match up to the new content types:- Message Board threads - Now called discussions. Any discussion in our community is a 'question' by default. This aligns with some of the functionality found on other sites like CodePlex and StackOverflow. Responses to the question can be marked as Correct or Helpful, hopefully helping people find the answer more quickly.
- Ideas - This is where some of the huge improvements can be seen. Ideas, as mentioned before, are now just like any other piece of content. This means that the same notification mechanisms already in place can notify you about new ideas so you can vote up the ones you want to see implemented in the product. We can now get emails for new ideas or comments on ideas! The easiest way to make sure you get notifications about ideas is to make sure you're 'following' the IM Community.
- Mentions - We can now call out specific people in our content. This works just like Twitter: hit the @ symbol and start typing someone's name. A box will pop up with matches. You can also just hit the @ symbol to see the list of recent things you've looked at or interacted with.
- Your Social Profile
The profile system in Jive is better than the old system. You can now add all kinds of information to your profile. To do this click on your avatar in the gray bar just to the left of the search box. You can view and edit your profile right from there. Since there is a much better social aspect to the Jive platform, people may actually see your profile. Feel free to link to your LinkedIn profile, your online resume, or anything else you want people to know about you. - Following vs. Friending
The old system had a concept of 'friends'. Your 'friendships' were links between you and other people that would allow you to interact with them on a limited scale. Jive introduces the concept of 'follows'. A follow is where one person wants to see the content of another person. The Jive equivalent of the old 'friendship' is a set of two follows, each friend following the other. All friendships from the old system were converted into these two-way follows, which will cause any activity from your friends to show up in your Connections stream and your activity in theirs. - Streams
The old system had an activity feed, but it wasn't anywhere near as flexible as the Streams functionality in Jive. Every one of you has at least an Activity Stream (all activity by everyone in any community) and a Connections stream (all activity from people/places you are following). You can create additional streams to break that content into manageable chunks. For example, you can create a stream containing all your friends who are Spectrum experts and another for all your friends who are NetQoS experts. You can create another containing only the CA folks. You can also pick any stream to be your default stream by clicking the push pin to the right of the stream name. The great part about these streams is that you can turn email on or off per stream. Eventually, you'll even be able to apply filters to the streams so that individual streams can be made to include all content for individual products (restoring functionality lost during the migration). Look for that functionality before the end of the year.
Now there is a place for all community members to congregate and interact with each other and the Jive administrators, regardless of which community you belong to. Got an idea for the new community platform? Post it in . There is also to the new platform.- Automatic follows
Any interaction with anything on Jive automatically follows that item. So, if you comment on a discussion, vote on an idea, or like a blog post, any other activity on the content will get to your inbox.
We hope your transition to the new platform hasn't been too painful. We have already seen a ton of activity on the community and we see great potential in the Jive platform going forward. If there is anything any of us can do, please feel free to start a discussion with us by mentioning us.
Your IM Community Board,
Michiel Helder
Dildar Kahlon
Jacquie Cowe
Christian Schneider
Stuart Weenig
Our CA Liaison: MelissaPotvin