Release Notes & Updates

7 MIN READ

15.5 Release Notes

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

10 years ago

The 15.5 Release provides improvements and enhancements to several existing features, including kudos handling for merged posts and Product Mentions, as well as several enhancements and changes to the Community APIs, Studio, and FreeMarker.

With the 15.5 Release, we are happy to announce the general availability of the improved Lithium Connector for Salesforce, which enables you to create an even tighter integration between your Lithium Community content, Salesforce content, and Salesforce cases.

New features and enhancements

Lithium Connector for Salesforce v3
Merging kudos when moving one Idea or Contest into another
Community API v2 enhancements
Community API v1 changes
Studio enhancements
FreeMarker enhancements
Rich content text and images in Product Mentions now pulled from the Product Editor

Lithium Connector for Salesforce v3

The Lithium Connector for Salesforce v3 enables you to create a tight integration between your Lithium Community content, Salesforce content, and Salesforce cases. With the Lithium Connector for Salesforce, you can:

Automatically escalate unanswered threads to Salesforce.com cases
Manually escalate threads to Salesforce.com cases (for community moderators or administrators)
Use enhanced federated search across Lithium and Salesforce content
Link Salesforce and Lithium Community content via postback
View community member details and statistics within Salesforce.com

New features in the Lithium Connector for Salesforce v3 include:

Managed Service: You can now install from the AppExchange; you no longer need to install from the source code. Additionally, the integration now auto-detects and provisions for optional Salesforce modules.
Multi-tenancy: Ability to connect a single Salesforce instance to multiple Lithium communities.
TKB article integration: Sync community TKB articles with Salesforce Knowledge Articles.
Case-escalation improvements: Escalation triggers, manual case closures, ability to escalate main post of a thread and to manually escalate forums to Salesforce Knowledge Article.
Improved Post-back options: Support for rich text and community post-back.
Improved synchronization: Automatic case closure when replies are marked as solutions on the community.
Private message support: Ability to create private messages between Lithium and Salesforce.
Enhanced Federated Search: Filter searches based on relevance, case interrupts, and whether Community content was used to resolve cases.
Metrics: Community member data available from the Salesforce author profile page.

Note: You must be on Release 15.4 or later to use the new Lithium Connector for Salesforce.

The integration requires you to import a package into your Salesforce.com environment. The package includes:

Custom fields that extend the Salesforce.com Case and Solution objects
New, custom objects (Community User, Community Postback Comment, Related Content, Private Message), along with their associated fields
Salesforce.com Visualforce Pages and Apex classes for viewing community user statistics
Reports for support agents

Learn more about installing, configuring, and using the new Lithium Connector for Salesforce.

Merging kudos when moving one Idea or Contest into another

When you move an Idea or Contest post from on location into another, you now have the option to merge the kudos of the post you’re moving into the post you’re merging it into:

When you select this option, the original idea or contest entry is converted into a comment in the destination post and all the kudos in the original post are added to the total kudos count of the idea or contest you’re moving the post to, if those kudos were not given by users who had already kudoed the destination idea/contest.

Some notes about how kudos are handled during a merge:

If a user has kudoed both ideas, both kudos are retained during the merge.
The merged idea becomes a comment in the destination idea/contest, and the kudos for the merged idea stay with that comment.
If any of the merged kudos are by users who have not kudoed the destination idea, those kudos are added to the total idea/entry count. In short, we de-duplicate kudos given by the same user in the kudo count for the destination idea/contest.
Users retain all kudos in their total kudos given count.
If a user’s kudo is merged into another idea/contest, that user cannot later kudo the destination idea/content, since their merged kudo has already been added to the idea’s/contest’s total kudo count.
This action cannot be undone. If you later decide to separate the merged messages, the kudos will not be removed.

Example

Let’s say we have 2 ideas (one by Suzie and one by John), and that Bradley has given kudos to both ideas. Suzie’s idea has 10 kudos, and John’s idea has 2 kudos (one by Bradley and one by another user who has not kudoed Suzie’s idea). When John’s idea is merged into Suzie’s idea and the admin opts to merge the kudos, the following happens:

John’s idea becomes a comment with 2 kudos in Suzie’s idea.
The total kudo count for Suzie’s idea goes up to 11. (Bradley’s merged kudo isn’t added to the total count since Bradley has already kudoed Suzie’s idea.)
Bradley retains his 2 kudos in the system.
The other user, whose kudo was merged, cannot later kudo this idea, since the merged kudo has already been added to the total kudo count.

Community API v2 enhancements

New fields added to the Image resource. Now returns width and height in the response. Can use in a SELECT statement.
You can now use the login field to order by ASC and DESC in ORDER BY clauses in LiQL queries on a User collection. For example:
SELECT id, login FROM users ORDER BY login ASC
The IN() operator is now supported for the id field in WHERE clauses in LiQL queries on a User collection. For example
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id IN(‘1’,’2’)

Community API v1 changes

Removed extraneous user profile fields from the response

We have removed a series of user profile fields from the response from the Community API v1 calls such as user/profiles, users/id/id/profiles/name/profile_name, and users/login/login/profiles/name/profile_name.

The calls used to return a series of “charset” fields, similar to the ones shown below, that are for internal use only and cannot be edited by users or administrators.

<profile name="charset_email" type="string">unicode</profile>

......

</profiles>

</response>

See User profile fields for more information about the profile fields returned from your calls.

TKB message calls reflect manual sorting option

In 15.4 we released a manual ordering option for TKB articles. With 15.5, calls to retrieve topics and messages from TKB boards return messages in the response in the order defined in Community Admin > Features > TKB > Ordering when Manual is chosen as the sorting option. The following calls reflect manual ordering:

For all other sorting options defined in Community Admin, the calls return the messages in descending post date. LiQL queries on a Message collection do not return messages in manual sort order.

With this addition, the TKB manual ordering feature is now officially released for General Availability.

Studio enhancements

Description and Help Text for Custom Components in Studio

You can now add help text including the description, where a component can be used, and any configuration options available to appear in a hover card and details modal in Studio. You can also create a user-friendly name for the component to display in the Components list in Studio > Page.

See Add descriptions and help text for custom components in Studio for details.

FreeMarker enhancements

New calls on the dateSupport FreeMarker context object

We’ve added two new calls on dateSupport to support more ways of formatting and using dates in your components and endpoints. The calls simplify conversion of dates between different formats:

setDate(milliseconds_since_epoch): Returns a new date support object set to the given date.
date: Returns a new java.util.Date object based on the current date support object.

See dateSupport FreeMarker Context Object to learn more about dateSupport.

Rich content text and images in Product Mentions now pulled from the Product Editor

When three or more images are mentioned in a post, a carousel displays at the bottom of the message with rich content snippets linking to the product URL defined in the Community Admin > Features > Products > Product Editor.

Previously, the product title, description, and image displayed were pulled in from the product page instead of the values entered into the Product Editor. Now data from the Product Editor is used as long as the Title, Description, and Image URL fields all have values. If one or more of these field values are missing, then the data from the product page is used instead.

See About Product Mentions for full details.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

We have fixed the issue where the Time on Site metric was being miscalculated when members had multiple, concurrent sessions (for example, two sessions in two different browsers). Previously, if a member had 2 concurrent sessions that lasted 10 minutes each, the Time on Site for that member would be 20 minutes. With this change, we now report the Time on Site as 10 minutes.

Note: As a result of this change, you might notice that your member Time on Site doesn’t accrue as quickly, if your members tend to run multiple, simultaneous sessions.

When making a REST call to get metrics, you used to get an unexpected error if you provided only the date_start. This issue has been fixed, and now the call returns all data from the date_start value to the present date.
We have fixed the display error where quotation marks were displaying as “"” in plain text subscription notifications.

When a video, image, or attachment is uploaded and used in a post, a small video, image, or attachment icon is displayed next to the title to indicate that the post includes these attachments. Previously, these icons displayed for forum posts, but not knowledge bases. This display issue has been fixed, and now the icons display for attachments in knowledge bases, too.