If you haven't heard already, BMC Communities is getting a makeover in the next weeks.
This is a follow-up to share some details on how to find resources and conversations relevant for you in the new BMC Community.
In the next paragraphs, we'll describe the new navigation on BMC Community (illustrated by Use Cases), and then connect the dots by describing where resources are stored and appear.
Navigation and Use Cases
Let's have a look at the main Use Cases/experiences provided in the new BMC Community.
The navigation was designed to quickly give access to the most important Use Cases:
Global navigation: quick access to main landing pages
We simplified navigation (only a few menu items, no drop-down), the body of the page will become a lot more personalized to make your journey even more productive.
Home page
The home page is a good start, each day on BMC Community (note: most of you will begin with notifications with the top-right bell).
Homepage experience for logged in members
This initial page is very far from static: it's personalized for each Member, actionable for you:
- A feed of live content:
- Your feed on the Community, so that you catchup with latest updates: topics you follow, or content you interacted on
- The global Community feed, great way to discover what else happens on the Community
- List of all the Products/Topics you follow, so that you can deep-dive about it (more details below)
- List of All the groups you are a member of, so that focused interaction is one click away
Visitors can't have a personalized experience, so they will be presented with quick access to top products.
Products
Products, the first menu item in the top navigation, is a great place to finds products that you already use, or want to know more about.
Once you select a product topic, it is very easy to engage on various resources with a tabbed view.
Easily explore and engage on all relevant content associated with each product
The tabbed view will give access to
- Recently Active content, (sorted by last active)
- New Posts, a feed on all interactions, sorted by creation date)
- Filtered view by content type: knowledge articles, blogs, documents, events and ideas.
In a nutshell, each Product page will give a great way to see all resources for this context.
You might be wondering why we are using the word 'topic'. A topic helps to display resources that share the same context. Think of it as a 'tag' that you can associate with your content. All products (Remedy ITSM, Control-M...) are topics, and you will see other topics like 'Customer Success', 'Job and Careers', 'Off Topic' (ironic, isn't it? ) and more. You'll see on next section that this new datamodel gives us advanced flexibility.
Groups
Groups are where interactions happen with your peers, on specific focus areas. You'll find groups with various permissions and goals:
Public groups include:
| Private groups include:
| Secret groups include:
|
To browse all groups, be able to join them and interact on each, we propose:
- featured groups,
- search capability,
- an option to view only the groups which you are a member of.
Groups listing page
Partners
Partners are very important for our ecosystem.
The Partners menu will enable:
- any Member to learn more about existing partners all over the world
- new partners to become familiar with Partners Programs, be onboarded and getting access to many private resources (in groups as you can guess, that will appear in-context)
Existing partners can join partner-only groups to explore and discuss sensitive topics with BMC partner team.
Help
Need answers on how to use the new BMC Community, or have a suggestion to improve your community experience? This is the place to go to!
The Help is only for meta information about the community.
All the technical questions about products should be posted in respective product topics.
You'll notice that Help menu points to BMC Community (treated as a Topic, like any BMC product -- isn't BMC Community a product that you often use and enjoy
Content, Topics and Groups
Many Community Members are engineers, and like to understand details like storage and taxonomy and relationships.
Things will be very flexible with the new BMC Community, a discussion will be able to be associated to several topics. A great benefit is that this question will appear on all the topics that have been associated to the question, increasing the chances that people experienced with any of this product can weigh in.
Question associated with 3 products (topics)
Same applies for other content types, for example an Event. Again, this webinar would appear on all the topics associated, giving more context, and increasing the chances to touch people who care
Webinar associated with 2 topics
Last but not least, let's talk about groups.
What if a content was posted within a group? If a question is asked on India User Group, and associated to 2 product topics, it will then appear on 3 pages:
- this User Group,
- each topic
Conclusion: don't worry about exact storage location of each content, it's on the Community, and is displayed where it make sense
Next Steps
Should have questions about this blog post, comment below.
If you haven't seen initial post about Community transformation, see key changes here
We will publish more details on other key features and functionalities in the coming days, so you will be comfortable exploring the new BMC Community from day 1.
We currently plan to post about Profile, Notifications and Privacy. Sounds good?
