DX Unified Infrastructure Management

For the sanity of existing UIM users moving to this new site, please do not merge the UIM community into the existing CA IM community.

The old existing CA IM community is a conglomerate of old aging legacy products.

Please do not bury UIM like you showcased here in the Product Covered slide.

UIM should have its own dedicated community group just like SOI has its own community.

UIM should be easily located and found at the "Communities" level. (https://communities.ca.com/places?itemView=thumb)  It should not buried.

Should be easily found here at this location:

End users who know CA, know that the “CA IM” is a product suit offering by CA and is sold as a collection of the products listed above.

Folks know this is not UIM / (Nimsoft). When I headed on over to the 'new' place, I initially was looking for UIM it since I know CA IM is not CA UIM. But then watched the video and was totally annoyed that it was buried it in this existing sub-community.

Please move it up a level to its own community space.

The IM in the "CA IM Community" is not for the IM product (which is actually called IM2.0 and is a combination of PM2.0, Spectrum, and NFA). The Infrastructure Management community refers to Infrastructure Management as a concept. The UIM product is expected to become the flagship product in the IM space, so it makes sense to me from that perspective that UIM become part of this community.

That said, the addition of the UIM users has caused an uptick in the content related to UIM. Since Jive only allows following an entire community or individual content, having multiple products in the same community doesn't necessarily make sense. For example, i'm not vested in all the products in this community, however because of the way following works, i get emails on all the products. Adding UIM has changed my relevant email percentage from 15% to about 8%. Nobody likes getting irrelevant email notifications and it could eventually lead to people disengaging from the community. However, it was done this way because the existing community leadership model needed like products to be together in the same community. Since that's changing shortly (to not having dedicated community members as volunteer leaders), having the products in one community doesn't really make sense any more.

SamCreek, MelissaPotvin, Melanie_Giuliani, J.J.Lovett: Is CA open to the option of splitting out each product into its own jive place? Is there a reason i'm missing for keeping these products within a single community/place? Splitting them into individual communities will allow for individual product follows, hopefully leading to less irrelevant emails. I see a difficulty when a single post spans multiple products, but that gap can be addressed with tags, cross linking, good moderation, etc.

hi DBlanco1

So glad we had the opportunity to speak just now. I hear you and your concerns do not fall on deaf ears. The decision to migrate UIM into this community was not a decision made lightly.

I understand that the finding and sorting of content can be challenging. As your Community Manager, the promise I have made to you and to this entire community of thousands is to do my best to keep the content organized and make your experience here a positive one. There are also options available to make the consumption of content in this community easier. One option is to follow content for a particular product category by Subscribing via RSS Feeds, another option is to Create Custom Streams. You can also manage your Following and Preferences to ensure you’re only being alerted to things that you care about. 

We are always open to any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions on how to make the community and its content more manageable.

For the moment, the UIM content will stay here though I will take your feedback back to the business and maybe in the future we can explore options.　

Just to let you know, the RSS subscriptions aren't as useful as they seem. The reason for this is that comments on content cause the content to be republished through the RSS feed (as expected), but the original post is included in the RSS item, not the comment. This was enough to make the RSS option not a viable option for me. CA/Jive has still not provided a good option for following individual products. Unless something changes, I agree with you that UIM content may get buried.

MelissaPotvin CatalinF

I am just interested in 8 of the products that are part of the IM Community. Can you tell me is there a way to just receive notifications for those products? If so how do I do that? Neither of the options above (RSS feeds or Custom Streams) seem to allow me to do that.

When the communities moved over to Jive one of my comments was a request to be able to filter by specific product. I seem to recall that we were told that would be coming. Not sure how long ago that is now but that hasn't happened yet and I see no sign of that changing. What is the reason for not creating separate communities (or sub-communites that we can follow separately) for each product?

John

MelissaPotvin

Melissa,

I haven't seen an explanation as to why you have taken the decision to put all these products into a single community. What benefit does that provide to anyone? Can you provide an explanation please?

I would hope that losing one of the most active and helpful members of the community (Stuart) will cause you to reevaluate that decision.

John

hi John, I understand you are eager for a response and thank you for reaching out to us. I have asked the business to draft a response to the community with the explanation you are looking for. So, I'm going to ask for your patience while they work on that.  In the meanwhile, it's been only a few days since we moved to the new platform.  I'm going ask that we give this a chance to work. There are some great features in moving over to our new community platform and if you want anyone here at CA to review those with you, we are very happy to do that with you at anytime.

Melissa

I am not part of the new UIM influx and have been using this platform for a bit longer. I have always found notifications on this platform problematic. Adding in the UIM product to the IM community has simply brought these issues to the fore. I have had to put up with emails for products I’m not interested in for quite a while but the influx of UIM emails has made this unbearable.

What makes this so disappointing is that the previous communities site allowed this and I seem to recall CA said they would fix this after the move to Jive, however you have failed to follow through on that.

So moving to Jive in my view has been a regressive step for the communities.

John

I for one am currently using Spectrum, eHealth, UIM, with a goal of completely shutting down the Spectrum/eHealth environment in a couple of months.  We're finding some depth of reporting and SNMP support, and simpler discovery process, missing in UIM.  It's nice to see CA slamming us all in together especially for the folks attempting the migration to UIM.

This should not be a new experience for those of us who have been in the communities a while. When PM2.0 came out, it was decided to just add that product to the existing community already containing the products that it was assumed PM2.0 would eventually replace. This is not really that different.

Like i said, i'm actually in favor of splitting each product out to its own community. However, as MelissaPotvin mentioned, for the moment, we won't get that. If the community leaders still had any power, I'd say to bring it up with them. For now, your best bet is to help MelissaPotvin understand your pain and help her understand that everyone is feeling it (not just you and me). That way, she can take that information back to the people who can make the decision to actually implement the change.

It occurred to me while I wrote this that we could open an idea asking for the community to be split. So, I've opened: Split IM Community into separate communities per product.  Please vote on it.

I really don't see a reason in splitting this already organized structure. Just create your own custom streams or use follow for your community page that you're interested in.

CatalinF, I currently follow the community, so i get emails about every post on the community. So, "use follow for your community page" doesn't work because i still get emails about UIM, eHealth, sysEdge, etc. that I'm not interested in. This option is the best option, but it's far from ideal.

I see no way of creating a custom stream that includes all content posted for particular categories. This has been confirmed as a wish-listed feature from the Jive platform, so I'm very interested if you've found a way to do it.

Currently, when a user creates content that is related to a particular product, they have to pick the community and the category under which the content should be created. Since content defaults to the community you're currently viewing when you launch the new content page, that part is fairly automatic. However, there are many times that the category isn't selected properly by the end user. This screams data inconsistency. If the products were put in individual communities (as Jive is really designed to work), the community would automatically get applied in most cases. So, I would argue that separate communities would lead to better organization of the data since the organization of content would rely less on the proper categorization by the end user.

Stuart, to your point: "However, there are many times that the category isn't selected properly by the end user. This screams data inconsistency". As you know, Community Management will always look for instances when the category may be left blank (or is incorrectly assigned) by the end user.  This will always be part of our standard operating procedures.  We will continue to work with our new community members to build on the training momentum established prior to the migration.  This is to be anticipated.

I understand that there is/will be a manual process to correct manual data inconsistency errors. My point is that by eliminating the need to categorize and instead using the place as the primary delimiter for content, this manual correction (by CA) of a manual mistake (by the user) can be minimized. Less work for CA, better data, better notifications. Once the musketeers are disbanded officially, there's no significant need to maintain the old community model.

yes, please split the communities. It seems that there are many new requirements for UIM and to many of them are pushed into this community.

Hello

Same for me. Please split communities or provide a better way to read only post for relevant products. Stuart has some reasonable topics in his post from 18.03.2015 13:33.

Regards

hi Leo, please scroll to the top of the thread to see my initial reply which gives some pointers on how to filter.  If you agree with Stuart, you can also vote up his idea. Thanks!

Hello Melissa

1. I've voted for Stuarts idea
2. Custom stream is no option. You can't select categories like Spectrum or eHealth (if CA can fix this, custom streams would probably be a good solution)
3. Following persons is not an option (there are too many new users and relevant users (like stuart) are posting to categories/communities that are not relevant for me)
4. RSS is not working reliable on categores as well (and I have no time/motivation to fix this with CA support. From my perspective basic stuff just needs to work)

Regards

Leo

hi Leo, you are correct. You can't select a category in the custom stream and I wish we had that as well!  We have asked our vendor to please consider this as an option but at this point, I don't have an ETA. (trust me, I want this as badly as you do)  You can follow people with the custom stream though you would have to locate the people you want to follow, and add only those people to a stream. On RSS - you do not need to speak to CA support and enter a case! oh my gosh, we can help you and will reach out to you directly to see if we can get that working quickly for you.  I'll be in touch soon as I get into the office. Have a good day!

Hello Melissa

Thanks for your offer. I should have been more precise on RSS. See feed from today in Spectrum:

Have a look at date column: replies are published with the initial creation date of the thread (1st Item "VLAN Support for Extreme Networks" should have get the date 19. March 2015 12:16:51). Therefore RSS is not "reliable" (Probably "usable" would have been better wording).

Regards

Leo_Baer, I noticed that as well when I attempted to use RSS. I'm curious if your experience with the RSS content itself is the same as mine. When i looked at a feed item for something that had been created previously but had just been commented on, I saw the original post and not the comment. I had to navigate to the community to see the actual comment. What has your experience been?

Hello Stuart

Confirmed as for the above "VLAN Support for Extreme Networks" I get the content:

          Extreme Networks does store VLAN information in their "Enterprise" OIDs and that makes it impossible at this point to use it in OneClick.

          Would it be possible to add support for this in the future?

          Thank you,

Which is the initial content of that thread from 14.06.2014. So in fact the date is "correct" but it's the wrong post that is published.

HI Stuart and Leo,

I understand that receiving emails including the original thread instead of the responses can be frustrating, but I believe this is working as designed - as it is just alerting you that an update has been made to that piece of content (whether it be an edit, a comment, etc.). However, navigating to that thread will reveal the response.

If you're following the entire IM community to your email, that will clearly be too much content coming in. We already discussed custom streams, but my suggestion would be to take advantage of the mobile app - which may provide you with the mobile capability of email without clogging your email inbox. My final suggestion would be to follow the IM community via inbox but turn off email - this will route the notifications to your Jive inbox or mobile app so you can still see when content is coming in without having it come directly to your email application.

I understand that none of these options are perfect, but just trying to highlight some options that may help to make notifications more manageable.

Thanks,

Melanie

To clarify, emails contain the response to existing content; they seem to work as designed and they do work as expected. It's the RSS feed items that contain the original post instead of the actual new content. If this is working as designed, it's poor design since it works differently than email and differently than most RSS feeds. Another problem with RSS is post duplication. If get the RSS feeds for two different categories and someone posts content and assigns it to both categories, it shows up in both RSS feeds.

Once again, custom streams are not really an option since i would only be following people i know. I wouldn't get notified about new users' posts.

The mobile app has the same problem as email. My only two options are to follow the entire community in a custom stream (with or without email) or only follow certain people. The same problem exists.

Following the community in my inbox vs. inbox with email just shifts the problem from congestion in my email to congestion in my jive inbox. Same problem, different location.

Not only would I call these options not perfect, they aren't really even usable. This is why I have unfollowed the community, which is your suggestion of custom streams. I have custom streams that only include the people i know, and I have email configured for those streams. So, the only emails i get are for interactions from the people i know and content i've interacted with. I guess you could say i'm putting your money where your mouth is. I know you guys have advanced reporting capabilities that will help you see the difference between my activity before yesterday and after yesterday (when i unfollowed the community). I would love to see what that data shows after a while (perhaps excluding my activity on this thread). My guess is that it will show a significant decrease in engagement. If that is the case, this problem has the potential to significantly decrease engagement across the community. This potential impact should be concerning for you guys; hopefully concerning enough to make some sort of change (either split the community or add categories to emails; the second is outside your control so I would focus on the first).

Well, I've reached my limit. I'm happy for the Nimsoft users who are active on the community.  However, the inability to filter out email notifications as originally promised combined with the uptick in activity has prompted me to unfollow the IM community. I'm still following people and content that i'm already following, but I'll no longer be answering new content by users I don't follow.

On a side note, another option that is sub-optimal is including the category string in the email. If at least the category was there, I could build a rule to automatically delete the emails for products in categories I'm not interested in. This would be shifting the responsibility from Jive to the end user, which means that there will still be users that will get flooded with unwanted emails, potentially driving them to the point I'm at right now (reclusion). However, it would be better than what we have today.

Hi Everyone, I have moved this discussion to the Water Cooler community because this is a community platform discussion and not a product discussion.  Thank you!

This graphic shows my activity levels. On or around the 23rd of March, I implemented the recommendation MelissaPotvin recommended above:

One option is to follow content for a particular product category by Subscribing via RSS Feeds, another option is to Create Custom Streams.

As mentioned before, I tried RSS feeds and it didn't work out well. Instead, I unfollowed the community from my main email stream, leaving only people I know. As you can see, my activity numbers dwindled significantly. I attribute the spike in views to this thread, on which I was highly active in the days before I made the change.

Here's some raw data showing my activities the week before the change and the week after:

Stuart,

It will be interesting to see this after a few months, I think 2 weeks is a relatively short period time to really see the difference, especially since we see a typical lull of 3-4 days per week for your older activity.  That said, I'd like to see you get back to your old levels of activity in a manner that was effective for you.

If any of you are wondering how Stuart found these #'s, he reached out to our team to provide these. If you are interested in data like this please reach out to your community manager. This needs to be pulled manually so it may take some time.

Thanks,

Sam

I've tried to accommodate the change to the Nimsoft forums but the usability of this new format is so inferior to the previous tool as to make it simply irritating. CA has effectively, and once again, taken usability and simplicity and replaced it with uselessness.

-Garin

Hi Garin, I'm terribly sorry if you feel any frustration.  I have reached out to you - as I would like to spend some time chatting about your experience. Understanding this may allow us to help others as well.  Of course we want to work with you so we can turn your experience on the community into an enjoyable one.  I look forward to that discussion and hope to hear back from you soon.

My interactions with the community don't need to be enjoyable. They need to be useful and productive. This community, as compared to the old Nimsoft forums, is less useful and less productive. And it becomes more so each day.

-Garin

Hi Garin, understand... but I can't help you if you don't allow me to speak to you. How about a phone call today or tomorrow?  how does your schedule look? 15 minutes should do it.

Keeping rough track of this myself, I can concur that my contributions follow a similar pattern.

And on top of the numerous data organization and general app usage issues with the new Jive platform, it is also painfully slow. Today, from the point of clicking the main link to get to the forums, I was able to boil water, grind coffee, assemble in a press, wait, pour, add cream and sugar and get three good sips before I got the first post displayed. 7 minutes from the point where I thought it was taking a long time to get going to the point where it actually displayed a post I wanted to look at. And on every page displayed I had to scroll to get to the point to click to move to the next page. Ugh.

-Garin

I've not anywhere near that level of performance problems. I wonder if anyone else has experienced that. 

My problems would be solved if emails were tailorable per product. Moving each product to its own community would do this. This shouldn't be difficult now that CA has disbanded community boards and replaced with 'champions'. In fact it should make the champions initiative better since champions could be picked per product instead of picking those who are active across multiple. 

The business has responded and here is a link to the thread:  Why we merged the UIM Community into the Infrastructure Management Community