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April 6, 2015
Earlier this month, Jive rolled out a variety of new features and functionality now available in internal, Jive-n, and external, Jive-x, communities. Community managers and system administrators can manually update their cloud instances to include these new features directly from the admin console with one click: System > Settings > News and select Enable.
So, what’s so great about Jive 8? Here are some of the highlights.
With Jive’s News feature, community managers and admin can now seamlessly deliver content and communications to targeted audiences by setting up and auto-subscribing members to particular streams. Once News has been enabled, you'll notice a few changes to the global navigation in your community. Now, you can easily access your inbox by clicking the @ button. If you have notifications, a number will show up to the right of the @ sign, indicating you have items in your inbox to review.
Tip: For an in-depth look at utilizing this new functionality, see how to Maximizing the Jive News Feature in Your Community.
Now, when you go to your Inbox page, you'll notice there's a tab on the left that says "Your View." This will bring you to a page that you can customize with different tiles to display the content, people, places, streams (and more!) that's most relevant to you.
Not sure which tiles to add to Your View?
Tip: If you want to really customize your experience in the community, you can now go to your profile Preferences page and set your Personal Home Page to your News stream or Inbox instead of the default Home.
You asked, Jive 8 has answered. You can now create custom Place pages, which will be added as new tabs within a space, group, or project. These tabs can be arranged in any order the place owner chooses. The page on the far left will become the landing page, with default tabs such as Activity and Content remaining fixed to the right of the custom pages. Place pages can be used to reduce the need for creating multiple subspaces or groups to organize content. Each place can have up to five custom Pages, each easily customizable with tiles and four different layout options.
Interested in trying Pages out in your community? To do so, either create a new place, or go to an existing place and select Settings > About > Advanced Options > Activity + Pages. Once you save your changes, you'll be able to create a new page by selecting Manage > New Page.
Tip: Pages cannot be enabled along with an Overview page. They only coexist with Activity pages.
Similar to widgets, Tiles are another means to display and organize content within a place in the community. Tiles are always displayed on a place's Activity page, to the right of the Recent Activity stream. In the Winter Release, the following tiles are now available to use on Activity Pages: Document Viewer, Carousel, Content Sets, Frequently Viewed, Recently Viewed, Recent Blogs, Ask a Question, and Answered/Unanswered Questions.
You may notice that some of these already existed as widget options on an Overview page. However, the newly added tiles will ensure that your content is displayed correctly in the newly updated version of the mobile app.
In Jive 8, you can now share content in multiple places in the community. This eliminates the need to create multiple copies of the same document to display in different places.
For example, say the 2015 Holiday Schedule is posted in the Human Resources space, but I want a copy of the same document in the private group I use to collaborate with coworkers. Instead of manually copying and recreating the content in a new document, I can share a copy with my group with one click. Whenever the original document is modified, the copy in my group will be reflective of those changes, so you won't need to update each copy.
You can now also share content posted in private groups with non-members. This is a good way of collaborating with someone without having to give them access to all of the content stored in a private group that's not applicable to them.
In Jive 8, several enhancements have been made to questions and answers, making it easier to prioritize which questions need answers, as well as which replies are the most effective and helpful. Unanswered questions can now be prioritized with the addition of the "I have the same question" button. This button will show up at the bottom of an unanswered question.
Any user (aside from the person who asked the question) can click the button, which will bring the question to the top of the content page when filtering through discussions.
Once a question has been marked as answered, it will no longer be displayed here, making it easy to see which remaining open questions are still in need of a correct response. Jive has also made changes to replies that have been marked as helpful. Before, an author could click on a reply in their thread, and select Actions > Mark as Helpful. Now others can also mark responses as helpful, which brings the community more control in identifying a reply as more helpful than another. To mark a response as helpful, simply click the Helpful button.
Although only one response can still be marked as Correct by the user who asked the question, you can now view the helpful replies in context. At the bottom of the thread, there will be a number of how many helpful replies are in the thread. If you click the number, a window will pop-up, displaying the helpful responses in context of the original question.
For larger threads, you can opt to display a "roll up" badge. By doing so, only replies that have received three or more helpful marks will be displayed in the thread. For Jive-x communities, this is a good way to hide responses that aren't adding value.
Last but certainly not least, this new feature allows you to associate an icon role badge with a user group (formerly known as permission group) right from the admin console. This is a good way to clearly identify key community members in the community.
To add a role badge to a user group, go to the Admin Console and select People > User Group Summary and then pick a group to assign a role badge to. On the settings page of the user group, you'll see a place where you can assign and upload a role badge.
Stay up to date on what's important and relevant to you by following tags. You can now follow tags in Activity streams, along with places, content, and people. This is a great way of staying on top of everything related to a particular subject, even if it isn't posted in a place you are following.
You can opt to turn on inbox notifications for the stream as well, so you'll receive an email for anything that's posted with that particular tag.
Make your community homepage mobile-friendly. In Jive 8, community managers can now customize the mobile homepage experience right from the community. In the avatar drop-down menu, simply select Mobile Home Page. This will take you to a responsive webpage where you can customize the mobile homepage experience with different tiles.
In Jive 8, search gets even smarter. New features include:
If you have any questions or need help with your upgrade, email contact@socialedgeconsulting.com for guidance from one of our experienced community managers.
