On June 5th at 6pm PDT we will begin our VMTN upgrade from Jive 5 to Jive 7. The upgrade will take around 30 hours to complete and we expect to be completed by June 6th around 10pm PDT. During this phase, VMTN will be in read-only mode. You will not be able to post discussions or documents but you will be able to read the discussions and documents. Also during the upgrade period, VMTN account creation through my.vmware.com will be suspended since the db will be in read-only mode.
Jive 7 release notes can be found at https://community.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-103485
Preview of what communities.vmware.com will look like once we are complete.
Look at feel will remain the same with this release but features have changed slightly. Noting major but there have been some enhancements which I will cover below.
Feature List
Discussion & Documents:
There’s a new option when creating a discussion or document which I find pretty cool. Rather then just drafting a discussion or document you can now draft the content or just share with specific users and then decide later to post to the community. The default option is chosen which in this case is ESXi 5 since we created this in the ESXi 5 community. You can see there are a few options here to choose from including “Specific People” which will be useful when drafting documents or joint discussions.
New Groups Widget for communities:
Jive 5 introduced groups which are like communities but have the ability to be open to all users, request to join and invite only which allows silo teams or groups to work. The open groups allowed any user to come into and have a discussion. Jive created a widget that goes and finds the duplicate groups and displays the content on the related community overview page. We will start to see these come into play after we launch Jive 7.
Mobile Experience – New iOS app:
Jive has a new mobile app for iOS and Android users. While this is an upgrade and a step in the right direction it does take some tinkering and getting use to. There are a couple great use cases for the Jive mobile app and some things to avoid or watch out for. The jive mobile app is great for finding content in communities you are following. To follow a community, click the “Follow” button in any of the VMware Communities and the content will start to appear in your “All Activity” stream in the mobile app.
Jive allows users to post a discussion to a personal location where the questions can easily be lost since it’s not created in a community and not easy to find. To avoid this, when using the mobile app to create a discussion make sure to change “Visibility” from “Everyone” to a community of your choosing.
Making this change will allow the content to be created in a community where others will find your content and will not be lost in your own personal conversation space.
User Profile
The new user profile is pretty nice, Jive moved from a simple user profile to a more linkedIn style. Here is the old Jive 5 user profile (never mind my bald head!)
Now for the new profile and as you can see, there are now skills, contact info and several other new cool informations ares I can populate and share info with the community.
Be sure to check out the new Jive 7 community platform early next week as we plan on releasing Jive 7 on the night of Sunday June 6th.
