Happy New Year and welcome to 2017! We've got lots of goodies for you to kick off your new year. First, we've greatly simplified the Profile Plus workflow and user experience to make it even easier for your users to adopt it and take advantage of the Personalized Feed. Next, we've enhanced several existing features, including 5-star rating support for TKB and Ideas on Responsive, new message editor spell check options, and new password reset lockout settings. Lastly, we've continued to improve our integration with Salesforce CRM.
New Features
- Simplification of Profile Plus workflow and user experience
- 5-star ratings support for TKB and Ideas with Lithium Responsive
- New Lithium Message editor spell checker setting
- New password reset lockout settings
- API updates
- Connector for Salesforce Service Cloud features and updates
Simplification of Profile Plus workflow and user experience
We are excited to announce the new, simplified Profile Plus. Users no longer need to self-identify and choose topics of interest. Lithium learns this information automatically from a number of inputs, including their interactions on your community and their connected social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and creates a personalized content feed on the community just for them.
Even though we've hidden the complexity of interests from your community members, you can still run reports in LSI to identify key influencers, super users, and hot topics on your community.
Though it's been simplified, Profile Plus still provides you with key business benefits:
- Increased user engagement and trust
- Faster resolution rates and customer satisfaction
- Optimized for the mobile experience
The next sections briefly describe changes to the Profile Plus experience. See About Profile Plus for a walkthrough of the updated Personalized Feed component, updated My Interests component (now called My Connected Social Networks in the Community UI), and simplified connection flow.
Note: We were not able to update the Studio help in the Page tab to reflect the simplified UI in time for this release cut. The information in these release notes contain the latest details for Profile Plus components as of 16.12. Studio help will be updated in the next release.
Improved Personalized Feed
Profile Plus's personalization feed delivers a personalized experience for community users. Lithium’s algorithms analyze user activity in the community (clicks, views, posts) and on social networks to deliver the most engaging content specific to each person, resulting in increased engagement, increased time on community, and better content discoverability.
Note: The Studio help text for this component incorrectly states that you can hide sections of the component using a parameter in XML View. The only configuration option for the Personalized Content Feed is the number of messages to include in the feed. This is controlled by the Maximum number of items (1-15) in the Personalized Content Feed setting in Community Admin > Features > Profile Plus. This documentation error will be fixed in a future release.
Simplified My Interests component
The My Interests component has been renamed to My Connected Social Networks in the Community UI. (This component will be renamed in the Studio Page tab components list in the next release.) The component now shows only the user's connected social networks and provides a link to the Profile Plus Settings page. The component no longer displays whitelisted topics of interest.
Simplified Profile Plus Header for forum posts
The Profile Plus Header no longer shows signature interests.
Simplified Profile Plus Hovercard
Signature interest are no longer displayed in the hovercard on forum posts.
Simplified Actionable Interests component
The Actionable Interests component now displays trending topics only.
Call-to Action: Connects components
The Personalized Content Feed component now includes call-to-action (CTA) functionality. We recommend using the Personalized Content Feed component instead of the standalone CTAs.
Simplified Profile Plus Settings page
The Profile Plus Settings page no longer includes functionality to search for and whitelist topics of interest or select signature interests. Now, users simply use this page to view connected social networks, go to klout.com to manage connections, allow or deny other community users the ability to click through to listed social networks, or disconnect Profile Plus.
Migrating from 16.11 and earlier
Customers using Profile Plus prior to 16.12 will not automatically see the following simplified UI parts:
- Simplified Profile Plus Settings page
- Simplified Hovercard
- Simplified Header
- Simplified My Interests component
To migrate to the 16.12 changes, contact Lithium Support and request that they enable the Simplified Profile Plus UI.
We recommend removing CTA components from all pages and using the Personalized Content Feed as your primary call to action.
5-star ratings support for TKB and Ideas with Lithium Responsive
Lithium Responsive now supports 5-star ratings for TKB articles and Ideas.
To configure 5-star ratings, see Configuring the Ratings feature. To learn more about Community rating options, see About 5-star, Helpfulness, and Me Too ratings.
New Lithium Message Editor spell checker setting
We now give you the ability to set whether to use the spell checker in the Lithium message editor or the user's browser.
To set the default spell checker to use for community posts:
- Go to Community Admin > Posts & Topics > Settings.
- In the Spellchecker to use for posts field, select the appropriate option:
Browser: Use the browser's spell checker.
Community Message Editor: Use the spellchecker in the Lithium message editor.
None: Disable spell check for user posts and replies. - Click Save.
New password reset lockout settings
Up to this release, you could only set the number of failed attempts and the associated lockout period for user sign-ins. Now, you can set the maximum number of password reset requests and the associated lockout period after the threshold has been reached in Community Admin.
These new settings enable you to protect your community against someone using a member's email address to spam the member's email with a flood of password reset requests.
Note: With the addition of these new fields, we have changed the title of the existing "Lockout time (minutes)" setting to be named "Sign-in lockout time (minutes)" to differentiate it from the similar password reset settings.
To set the maximum number of password reset attempts and lockout period:
- Go to Community Admin > System > Auto Signin / Cookies.
- In the Password reset attempts before lockout field, enter the number for the maximum number of times users can request a password reset before locking the them out.
- In the Password reset lockout time field, enter the number of minutes to lockout users before they can attempt to reset their password.
- Click Save.
Bonus Points support with Community API v2
We've added the bonus_points field to the Users collection. You can increment and decrement bonus points for a user. bonus_points is supported with PUT and GET.
The following is an example PUT that increments bonus points for a user by 5 points:
PUT /community/2.0/mytenantid/users/42 HTTP/1.1
Host: api.lithium.com
Content-Type: application/json
Cache-Control: no-cache
{
"data": {
"type": "user",
"biography": "I am the walrus.",
"bonus_points": 5,
"rank": {
"id": "4"
}
}
}
Deprecated APIs
We are deprecating the klout_topics.id field on the Community API v2 users collection as of 16.12.
We are deprecating the Community API v1 messages/id/[id]/message_rating< endpoint. This call was used with a deprecated 5-star rating feature used with Community version 9.0 and earlier. Message ratings now use our Rating endpoints.
Connector for Salesforce Service Cloud features and updates
We have made several improvements to the Salesforce connector, including:
Unified search
- Knowledge articles authored in and published from your connected Salesforce instance now show up in community searches. If you have "auto-suggest" turned on, community users will see knowledge articles from Salesforce in the suggestions along with the local community content suggestions. Also, you can use Studio to add the new CRM Knowledge Article Search component to your search results page. This component displays articles from your connected Salesforce instance matching the community user's search query.
CRM Knowledge Article Search component shown in slim mode for the community Search Page (ID: crm-knowledge-article-search):
- The recommendations component (id="recommendations.widget.recommended-content-taplet") can now include recommended Salesforce knowledge articles published from the CRM. There are new CRM-related settings for this component in Admin > Features > Recommendations.
Note: If you don’t see these features, you might need to be upgraded to version 3; open a Support ticket as needed. Learn more about setting up Salesforce search components for your community integration.
Message-level escalation capabilities
You can now control the scope of manual escalations. Previously, the only available scope was topic-level escalation (unless you had a customization). Now you can choose to also have message-level escalations available. Control the scope in Admin > Mod Tools > Escalation.
Note: If you currently have a customization in place that already adds message-level escalations to your community, you should consider removing this customization before using the new out-of-the-box capability.
Customize the data fields you send to Salesforce
You can now add any data field you like to the user sync, case escalation, and knowledge article processes. For example, you can send custom community profile data to your Contact records in Salesforce, and you can add fields to your case escalation process to send this data to Cases in Salesforce. If you'd like to add data fields, contact Lithium Professional Services or your Lithium account team for assistance.
You Found It. We Fixed It.
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The SEO Title, Description, and URL fields are no longer auto-populated when creating a forum post, blog post, or TKB article. These fields are left blank so that you can decide whether to use them and input the specific values you want.
- You can now @mention community members in TKB articles.
- Previously, if someone replied to a thread while it was being moved, the submitted reply was sometimes attached to the wrong post on the destination board. This issue has been fixed.
- Previewing comments in a TKB, Contest, or Idea thread no longer results in a error.
- We have fixed the issue where kudos given to a reply to a TKB article were being mistakenly being given to the root article.
- Previously, when you clicked the Create Group button (as a user with the Group Admin role), the category drop-down list included all categories that the user has permission to create groups in, not just the current node. Now, that list is scoped to the current node.
- We have fixed the display issue where clicking the Show more link on a TKB on a Responsive site revealed only a few more characters.
- The Length of topic preview in results field value (Admin > System > Search) is now honored and works properly on Responsive. However, if you want the preview to include more than 3 lines of the topic body, you will need to customize/override that styling to make it display properly.
- We have fixed the issue where Group admin/member permissions were not being set properly when creating a new group. Previously, the permissions were not set according to the defaults that each role had at the community level (Community Admin > Discussion Styles > Groups > Group Roles). With the fix, the permissions are now set based on the community defaults and can then be edited from that point to be node-specific.
- When using the Image Uploader on an iPad, you can now create a new album for that image.
- We have fixed the issue where users who did not have the Send group private message permission were able to send group messages.
- The view-count component no longer throws an unexpected error when placed on a page.
- Previously, trying to attach an .adt file to a post resulted in a MIME type error. This issue had been fixed, and you can now attach .adt files and complete your post without getting an error.
- We have fixed the display issue on Responsive sites where the message editor options wrapped oddly and appeared in the wrong locations using Internet Explorer 11 with macros.
- You can now edit content filters that include spaces. Spaces are not supported in content filters, but some customers had pre-existing content filters that included spaces before this restriction existed and were unable to edit and update these filters.
- We have fixed the display issue where long custom tag names was forcing the table to extend beyond the borders of the admin window instead of wrapping.
- Clicking a label on a post now takes you to the corresponding page for the label instead of the community landing page. Similarly, clicking a label on a search result page takes you to the label page.
- Previously, when you searched for an author and then sorted by replies, the results were not sorted properly; now the results are sorted by replies.
