VMware Technology Network has sprung into Spring 2017 with a successful platform upgrade from Jive 7 to Jive 8. This was a team project and credit must be given where credit is due – internal and external teams (vExperts & VMTN User Moderators) contributed to User Acceptance Testing, Jive provided ample support, and the VMware IT team did a spectacular job executing on this in the final hour. This was a community effort and I commend you all!
With this advancement, we are bringing our community new and improved features and functionality. Check out these 5:
Mobile Responsiveness
Communities now supports a clean, simple, and responsive design on mobile, including small width for phones, and medium for tablets. Visit communities.vmware.com on your mobile device to test it out for yourself.
Search Enhancements
Search has been redesigned and upgraded to Spotlight Search. You can access Spotlight Search by clicking the magnifying glass on the top right corner of any communities’ page. Spotlight provides suggestions, your history, and any pages you have bookmarked, prior to you entering keywords. Once keywords are entered, Spotlight provides relevant content, people, and places.
Improved Performance
Prior to the Jive upgrade, the team collected data from users all over the world around page load times. We determined the control variables that needed to be maintained by each participant, the intervals in which we would collect data, and our hypothesis’, which were proven true. We hypothesized that isolating certain communities from the VMTN umbrella and moving content to reduce the number of sub-communities would increase page-load times. We also hypothesized that a platform upgrade would increase performance. This is what we saw:
- Forum content (discussions/documents) – global average page-load times (seconds):
- Jive 7 – pre-data movement: 17.77
- Jive 7 – post-data movement: 6.63
- Post Jive 8 upgrade: 4.07
VMTN Forums by Language
The demand was clear in Jive 7; people need a place to find peer-to-peer VMware support in their native language, and that is what we’ve provided. We created 12 forums under the parent community VMTN Forums by Language, where users from all over the world are encouraged to come engage. Each forum has a dedicated moderator. Join the conversation here.
News (Formerly Activity)
Visit the News tab on the top of every page immediately next to “Browse” or visit https://communities.vmware.com/news?channel=discovery now to explore. The News page features tiles to help direct you towards the most active people, places, and content quickly. This page also provides quick access to your Connections Stream, what’s Top & Trending, and the Most Recent content streams.
News can be personalized by every user. Users can make multiple streams by selecting “New Stream” and customizing which Places, People, and Tags they would like to appear there. They can name the stream accordingly, and select whether or not they would like email updates on said stream.
For an in-depth visual tour of the new News interface click here.
Visit communities.vmware.com yourself to see what else Jive 8 has to offer. While you’re exploring, head to CloudCredibility.com, where completing VMTN tasks will gain you 3x the points on Triple Point Tuesday this Tuesday (3/21).
And finally, don’t forget to come back and leave us feedback, what do you think of Jive 8? Are these features helpful?
