We hope you all had a fabulous time at LiNC this year! The 16.5 release includes exciting features that were showcased at LiNC, including the ability to create a personalized community experience with Profile Plus and our new, responsive Community Design that includes a redesigned Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB) and Private Messages community user experience. Based on customer feedback, we’ve also made key improvements to Value Analytics and lots of other cool enhancements.

New Features

• Profile Plus (open beta)
• Tribal Knowledge Base updates
• New TKB responsive design
• Table of Contents support for TKB
• TKB article feedback workflow
• New Private Messages responsive design update
• Value Analytics updates
• User bans now captured in audit log
• API updates
• LSI - Support for up to 30 scheduled reports

Profile Plus (open beta)

Profile Plus creates a personalized experience for your community users tailored to their interests, expertise, and preferences. Profile Plus is powered with Klout, which scores a user’s social influence and expertise across different social channels and topics, including their community contributions and interests. The proprietary algorithms and the large volume of data on the Lithium Platform create an unmatched community personalization engine.

In short, Profile Plus takes your community to the next level, by creating a personalized community experience that enlists more participants. Members create more high-quality and relevant content, and other people benefit by finding answers faster. More questions being answered results in increasing community business value for your brand.

Benefits for members

Registered community members get a personalized experience that motivates them to contribute more content and also shows content that is relevant to them. They get a Personalized feed that surfaces relevant content, based on topical expertise and interests.  They also get a personal dashboard that show their rank and activity, advanced identity and privacy controls and personalized recognition by topic expertise.

Benefits for the brand

Brands drive better business outcomes from community based on higher quality content

• Consumers find higher quality answers faster, resulting in faster resolution rates and higher customer satisfaction
• Better content builds the knowledge asset and increases SEO

Brands improve loyalty and satisfaction

• Engaging more people with personalized content increases satisfaction and loyalty
• Gamification by topic expertise increases community member engagement

Brands have a deeper understanding of their customers

• Easily identify top experts and influencers by topic
• Granular social and behavioral customer data you can leverage for more personalized service and marketing

Let’s see Profile Plus in action

Here’s an overview of what the typical connection workflow looks like to your community members. As we’ve discussed, Profile Plus is powered by Klout to identify a user’s interests, social influence, and expertise across different social channels. The combination of Klout and community data creates a pool of data we use to establish a personalized community experience and highlight common interests among community members.

Connecting Profile Plus is a two-step process: connection and profile completion.

Step One: Connection

First, a community user follows a call-to-action (CTA) to complete his profile and personalize his community experience.

Three stand-alone CTAs and the My Interests component can all be used to start the connection flow. The standalone CTAs render only to users in the pre-connection phase; they do not appear after a user successfully connects to Profile Plus. After users connect, they are prompted to complete additional settings in the Profile Plus page. The user can dismiss the prompt, if desired, and continue the flow at a later time.

Step Two: Profile completion

To complete the Profile Plus connection flow, a user selects topics of interest and a few other optional settings. These topics populate the Personalized Content Feed on the Community landing page so that the user sees the posts in the community matching these subjects. These same topics are highlighted in the My Interests component in the View Profile page to share and showcase expertise with other community users.  

Users who choose to dismiss the initial prompt to select topics of interest see interim versions of the Personalized Content Feed and the My Interests components that display prompts to complete their Profile Plus settings. After the user selects topics in the Profile Plus page, the components display in their full states with a personalized feed and user’s interests and social network connections.

Here’s a diagram that illustrates the flow.

Advisories and notes before enabling Profile Plus

Before enabling and deploying Profile Plus, be aware of and consider the following:

• Profile Plus is in Open Beta. As such, there is no Product Management or Services hand-holding.  For example, you are responsible for styling changes to the out-of-the-box Profile Plus components. If you have questions, go to the Profile Plus Open Beta Program blog post and make your comments there. Like any beta, features are subject to change prior to GA.

• Profile Plus is not supported for Mobile v1 or Mobile v2. You must be using Responsive v1.7 or higher.
• The more heavily customized your site is, the more likely you’ll need to make CSS changes to best support Profile Plus.
• As always, it's important to thoroughly review the feature changes in your staging environment before going to production.

Enable and configure Profile Plus

To participate in the Profile Plus open beta, contact your Customer Success Manager to sign up.

When you request to join the beta, your CSM will ask you for your company logo.

The logo image you provide must be:

• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format
• Circular, monochrome and transparent
• 24x24 pixels, minimum

Good examples:

The image must not:

• use a data image (bitmap)
• have “<image x="0" y="0" width="100" height="100" xlink:href="data&colon;image/jpg;base64 ....”
• have a background (background will be styled by CSS using desired color)

After Profile Plus has been enabled for your community, you can turn it on, configure it, and start updating your community pages to include the Profile Plus components.

Tip: Before enabling and rolling out Profile Plus, review our Best practices to consider when rolling out Profile Plus to your community.

To enable and configure Profile Plus:

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Profile Plus.
   
2. Select Turn on Profile Plus.
   
   
3. Configure the remaining settings:

• URL for Klout Welcome Emails: The URL to include in the Klout welcome email after a member connects their community profile to Klout.
  
  

Tip: We recommend testing these auto-generated emails before you go live to make sure they work and look the way you want.

• Community name to use in Klout: The community name to use on klout.com and Klout welcome emails.
• Show Profile Plus components to: Defines which community members (everyone, specific users, or specific roles) to prompt with the Connect to Profile Plus message.
• Users/Roles list: Enter the comma-separated list of users or roles to prompt with the Connect to Profile Plus message (if you selected “Specific Users” or “Specific Roles” above. (This is the way you can whitelist specific users during your testing phase.)
• Community URL: Enter the public-facing URL for your community home page.
• Default checkbox to “Checked” for Profile Plus co-registration: Select this option to enable users who attempt to sign in via SSO to have the option to register with Profile Plus at the same time.

• Show Klout score as part of the user profile: Select this option to have a connected user’s profile include the icon that indicates their Klout score. Note that individual users can override this setting if they choose.
  
• Maximum number of items (1-15) in the Personalized Content Feed: Sets the maximum number of topics (1-15) you want displayed in a user’s personalized content feed. Adjust this number based on how many topics you think is appropriate to show or the amount of space you want to dedicate to it on your community pages. By default, this value is set to 5.

4. Click Save.

After you enable the Profile Plus, we recommend adding these engagement components to the appropriate pages on your site to encourage your members to connect their accounts and select topics of interest to build their personalized content feed.

About the new Profile Plus components and where to put them on your community site

Here’s the breakdown of the new Profile Plus components, which are available in the Studio > Components > Profile Plus folder:

Note: None of these components appear to anonymous users.

Call-To-Action: Connect (Feed Graphic)

Creates a call-to-action (CTA) component to enable Profile Plus.

Following the CTA takes the user through a connection flow that ends with a prompt to select interests to highlight in the community and tailor the Personalized Content Feed component.

After a user follows the CTA, the component no longer displays.

Where to use this component: This component works well in quilt sections that span the entire page. We recommend putting it on the Community Page, although you can use it on any page within the community.

Call-To-Action: Connect (Profile Graphic)

Creates a call-to-action (CTA) component to enable Profile Plus.

Following the CTA takes the user through a connection flow that ends with a prompt to select interests to highlight in the community and tailor the Personalized Content Feed component.

After a user follows the CTA, the component no longer displays.

Where to use this component: This component works well in the side-rail of a quilt. We recommend putting it on the Community Page, although you can use it on any page within the community.

Call-To-Action: Connect (Text)

Creates a call-to-action (CTA) component to enable Profile Plus.

Following the CTA takes the user through a connection flow that ends with a prompt to select interests to highlight in the community and tailor the Personalized Content Feed component.

After a user follows the CTA, the component no longer displays.

Where to use this component: We recommend putting this component on the Community Page, although you can use it on any page within the community.

My Interests

This component has three states. The first is a call-to-action to enable Profile Plus. The second is a call-to-action to select topics of interest to display in the user's View Profile Page. The third and final state displays the interests selected and the user's social networks connected through Klout.

Where to use this component: Use this component on the View Profile Page.

Personalized Content Feed

Creates a personalized content feed based on interests selected in the Profile Plus Page. The component appears only to users who have enabled Profile Plus.

Where to use this component: Use this component on the Community Page.

View Profile Plus Insights in LSI

LSI includes a Profile Plus Insights report in the Members section.

To view your Profile Plus Insights report:

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click MEMBERS.
4. Click Profile Plus.
   

This report shows you the total number of your community members who have connected to their their community account with their other social network accounts and provides key information about their topics of interest/expertise and their social networks. 

Then, for your top 50 members (based on their Community score), this report shows their:

• Community Score: a number between 1-100 that represents the member’s influence on your community site.
  
• Klout Score: a number between 1-100 that represents the member’s online influence.
  Connected Networks: Lists the other social networks that this member is connected to (for example, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+)
• Expertise: List of topics that the member has been identified as an expert. (Experts are typically the in top 1-3% of all people who have expressed interest in these topics.)
• Interests: List of topics that the member has chosen as topics of interest in their Klout profile.

Tip: You can click any of the items listed in the Top Expertise and Top Interests lists. When you do, the list of Top Members updates to show you who are your top influencers on those topics of interest.

Using this report, you can identify experts and influences on your community, who you might want to enlist to answer other people’s questions based on their expertise. You can also use this report to expand your outreach into other social networks where your community members participate to help you increase membership and activity on your community.

Tribal Knowledge Base (TKB) Updates

New responsive design

When a user views a TKB article, you want them to know that the information in it is authoritative. TKB articles are either curated from Forums or written by trusted editors - often staff and trusted community members. When we redesigned TKB to be responsive, we applied this design principle: users should know they're not just viewing a forum conversation.

When you visit the redesigned responsive TKB, you'll see a new layout that looks significantly different from Forums or Ideas. We chose to emphasize content elements, such as article titles and snippets, to help browsing users find the help topic they're looking for with minimal distraction, which is why last reply dates, avatars, and comment counts are de-emphasized (but still around).

Note: You must update to TKB version 2.4 and Responsive version 1.10 to use these new TKB features.

Note: 5-star ratings are not supported for Lithium Responsive TKB articles at this time. 5-star ratings for TKB will be supported in 16.11.

We're also moving toward Helpfulness as the default feedback mechanism for TKBs. Unlike Kudos, Was this Helpful? Yes/No gives you both positive and negative signals, helping you understand where your articles are and aren't meeting user needs.

Note: In the near future, we’ll be adding the ability for users to submit private comments about why the article wasn't helpful to them. This feedback should help you guide and focus your knowledge base efforts to cover the topics that matter most.

If you enable the ability to feature articles for your TKBs, you can now feature up to three articles, instead of the previous limit of one.

Another shift we're making is the change to simple HTML templates for TKB articles. Customers have told us loud and clear that they want greater flexibility to create and manage their own TKB templates. To enable that, we've moved away from storing TKB templates in a custom XML format that drops multiple "editable regions" into your article. With Responsive TKB, the "Question and Answer" template is simply a pair of H2 headings for "Question" and "Answer."

You'll be able to rename these, or even list multiple Answers per article. Not only are simple HTML templates more flexible and easier to work with in the Editor, but in a near-future release you'll see new tools for adding and managing your own custom templates.

Note: There's no need to migrate any of your existing TKB articles; we handle this automatically for you. Any past templates you had are still there, and past articles will be updated to the new template format when you edit and save them.

Another change you might notice is that the the version information for the article is now presented in the top-right corner of the article.

Additionally, while working on an article, your auto-saved version information is shown in this area, too:

TKB is an exciting area where we have a number of enhancements in flight and planned. The focus of this release has been on Responsiveness and UI rationalization, but stay tuned for even more on TKB as we move forward.

New TKB article list view for Responsive Design

Similar in treatment to the Masonry view, the new TKB article list uses same-sized cards to highlight the article’s title, content, and helpfulness.

Note: Unlike the Masonry view, the TKB article list card does not display images.

Using same-sized cards makes it easier to scan article titles in the grid, and you can easily sort the articles by a variety of criteria.

Create Table of Contents for TKB articles

Sometimes, TKB articles can be lengthy and include multiple sections and subsections. A Table of Contents (TOC) at the top of the article helps users quickly jump to the section that interests them.

Currently, you can create your own TOC in the message editor by creating manual links with anchor tags within the article, but this can get a bit tedious to set up and maintain. With 16.5, you can now configure your TKBs to enable users to add a widget to the page that automatically creates a Table of Contents for the article.

You can set up global or node-specific options for the TKB Table of Contents feature. These settings enable the TOC feature for specific TKBs and set the default values for the layout of the TOC and the number of heading levels to include.

Note: The TKB TOC feature is not yet supported for TKBs using Responsive, and you cannot be on a version of TKB greater than version 2.0.

Note: You can only add a TOC to TKB articles using the Freeform template, not the Q&A or Solution templates.

To turn on and configure the TKB Table of Contents feature:

1. Sign in as an Admin and go to Discussion Styles > TKB.
2. Click the Table of Contents tab.
   
   
3. Click Enable users to add a TOC to TKB articles.
4. Choose the type of bullet (Solid circle, Hollow circle, Square, None) to use for each TOC entry.
5. Enter the number of pixels (5-50) to use for each indent level in the TOC.
6. Enter the number of heading levels (1-6) to include in the auto-generated TOC. For example, if you enter 3, the TOC includes Heading 1, 2, and 3 but not 4, 5, or 6.
7. Click Save.

When creating or editing a TKB article with the TOC feature enabled, members see an additional TOC button in the toolbar of the message editor:

Note: You can add only one Table of Contents per article, and the TOC always appears at the top of the article.

To add a Table of Contents widget to a TKB article:

1. Sign in to the community and go to a TKB with the Table of Contents feature enabled.
2. Create a new article or edit an existing one.
3. In the message editor toolbar, click the TOC button.
   
   
4. The Add Table of Contents window opens.
   
   
5. The default settings for the Table of Contents populate the fields. You can override these settings for the specific article.
6. Click Preview to see what your TOC will look like, making setting changes as needed.
7. Click Save.

In the article, a TOC image appears in the article.

When you Publish the article, the TOC displays at the top the article.

Any updates that you make to the article that adds or removes headers are automatically reflected in the TOC when you save and publish. You don’t need to manually re-generate the TOC to pick up new/removed headers in the article.

If you want to change the heading levels that display, the type of bullet used, or the indent space, just edit the article and click the TOC widget in the article to edit its settings.

TKB article feedback workflow

Up to now all feedback on a TKB article could only be done via comments. However, you really want comments to center around the topic the article discusses, not necessarily about feedback on the article itself (mistakes, typos, not answering the question you thought it should). As an author you want to be able to collect that reader feedback and respond to it.

We have added a TKB feedback mechanism to enable you to do this. The ability to provide feedback is built into the existing Helpfulness widget and enabled by default.

Note: The TKB TOC feature is not yet supported for TKBs using Responsive, and you cannot be on a version of TKB greater than version 2.0.

To provide feedback on an article:

1. Go to the TKB article you want to provide feedback on.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the article and in the Did you find this article helpful? box, click No.
   
   
3. In the text field that appears, enter your feedback.
   
   
4. Click Submit.

Article authors and admins can view and (if needed) delete this feedback. For example, after you respond to the feedback, you might want to delete it to keep the feedback clean.

To view article feedback, you must have the View TKB feedback permission.

To view feedback provided on a TKB:

1. Sign in to the community as a user with the View TKB feedback permission.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and click the feedback link.
   
   

The feedback comments display:

New Private Messages responsive design

Lithium Responsive now supports Private Messages. A few enhancements you’ll notice in your private messages experience on Responsive include:

• Clearer unread messages indicator: When viewing your list of private messages, unread messages appear in bold type and have a colored bar to make them stand out:
  
  
• More prominent New Message button: New Message button is front-and-center:
  
  
• Improved new message composition window: The New Message composition window has been redesigned to use the clean, responsive message editor. You can also easily create group messages, simply by entering multiple user names in the Send to field:
  
  
  Admins can click the Find Users filter for specific users for group messages.
  

Value Analytics enhancements

Since we launched Value Analytics last November, we’ve been excited to see how customers are using it to measure the performance of their community experience. Based on customer feedback, we implemented the following feature enhancements:

• New Community Experience Survey
• Improved wording of questions and revised flow
• Improved usability of the Value Analytics Admin screens

New Community Experience Survey

We’ve added a new survey called “Community Experience Survey,” which includes the content of the existing Impact Survey plus:

• A new, optional question regarding purchase intent: “As a result of your visit to the community, do you intend to purchase a product from <Brand Name>?”
  
  
• A new, optional question to collect free-text feedback: “Do you have any more feedback you want to share?”
  
  
  At the end of the survey, users are prompted with this question and can type their positive or negative comments in the freeform text field. (You can access the collected responses later from LSI by exporting the Community Experience Survey results to a CSV file.)

Improved wording of questions and revised flow

We’ve changed the wording of several questions to make them clearer and improve the accuracy of results and provide more flexibility in customizing answer choices. Here’s an example of the questions in the complete survey flow:

Improved usability of the Value Analytics Admin screens

You now have the ability to set a value for your Brand Name, which is now used in questions 5 and 7 in the Community Experience Survey.

Finally, we have moved the checkboxes that enable you to include / remove question and answers from the survey to the left side of the page, so it’s easier to see what’s in and out of the survey.

Otherwise, the survey works the same as the previous Impact survey. Learn more about enabling and setting up the Community Experience Survey.

What if I’ve been using the Impact survey?

Note: If you have already enabled and used the previous version of the customer survey (the Impact survey), you can keep using it for the next few months, but it will be turned off soon, so we recommend that you migrate to the new and improved Community Experience Survey. The Customer Experience Survey includes all the questions from the Impact Survey so there is no sacrifice in moving to the new survey.

If you have been using the Impact survey, you will see both the Impact Survey tab and Community Experience Survey tab in the Admin > Features > Value Analytics screen.

Additionally, you have an extra option in the Value Analytics global settings, where you can choose which survey to use on your community site.

By default, this option is set to your existing, live survey (the Impact Survey). However, when you’re ready, you can switch over to the Community Experience Survey.

Tip: We recommend making a clean switch to the Community Experience Survey permanently to streamline data analysis in LSI and to better take advantage of Lithium’s benchmarking.

Impact and Community Experience Surveys in LSI

Don’t worry about losing your historical data in LSI. If you’ve already been running the Impact Survey, you’ll see results for both surveys captured in LSI. Just click the name of the survey results you want to view:

About Value Analytics reporting in LSI

To ensure consistency with industry standards and preserve the ability to benchmark results across Lithium communities, you cannot customize the Value Analytics survey questions. However, you can customize some of the answers for specific questions based on your specific needs. If you do customize any answers, be aware that LSI does not log the time when you made the changes to your answers. Therefore, you should record the date/time you changed the answers and take that into account when analyzing the data.

Users bans now captured in audit logs

When an admin or moderator bans a user from the community, that action is now captured in the audit logs. Here’s an example of what a banned user entry looks like in the audit log:

Learn more about viewing the audit log.  

API updates

Lithium Responsive

We’ve added documentation for our new Search Page components and quilts added with Search version 2.3. You can read about them here in the Documentation Knowledge Base.

Community API v2

We’ve added new fields and HTTP calls to the inbox_notes and outbox_notes collections.

inbox_notes updates

• New is_read fields to indicate whether or not a private message in a user’s inbox has been read.
• HTTP PUT support:  PUT /community/2.0/mytenantid/users/1/inbox_notes/1 HTTP/1.1
• HTTP DELETE support: DELETE /community/2.0/mytenantid/users/1/inbox_notes/1 HTTP/1.1

For examples, see the inbox_notes collection documentation on the Developer Documentation Portal.

outbox_notes updates

• New is_read fields to indicate whether or not a private message in a user’s outbox has been read.
• HTTP DELETE support: DELETE /community/2.0/mytenantid/users/1/outbox_notes/1 HTTP/1.1

For examples, see the outbox_notes collection documentation on the Developer Documentation Portal.

Community API v1

We’ve exposed new calls on the Community API v1 Group resource. These calls were previously undocumented and can be used on all communities version 15.3 and later.

• /groups/id/[id] /group_roles
• /groups/id/[id] /group_roles/count
• /groups/id/[id] /group_roles/create
• /groups/id/[id] /group_roles/index/[index]
• /groups/id/[id] /group_roles/name/[role_name]

We’ve exposed a new call on the Product resource. This call was previously undocumented and can be used on all communities 14.10 and later.

• /products/id/[id] /ratings_average

Wrapping components in a div container

We’ve added documentation on how to wrap components in a div container with a specified class name directly in a page quilt. Read about this feature (supported 16.2 and later) in the Developers Knowledge Base.

LSI - Scheduled reports threshold increased

 We have increased the number of scheduled report you can have from 10 to 30. Learn more about creating scheduled reports in LSI.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have added the “Email me when someone replies” checkbox to the form when changing the status of an idea:
  
  

• We fixed the issue where you could not move the location of the Signature field in the Personal Profile form. You can now move the signature field anywhere in the PersonalProfile.PersonalProfile.form.xml file.
• Previously, guest reviewers were unable to comment on reviews if they had previously created a review using the same email address. Likewise, you could not leave a comment first and then create a new review using the same email address. We have fixed this issue and now guest reviewers can perform each of these tasks in either order, while using the same email address, just like it works for registered members.
• We have fixed the issue where the XML for a retrieved message with an attachment that contains an ampersand (&) in the filename,  was invalidated because the ampersand was not URL encoded. Now, the inclusion of an ampersand in the filename does not invalidate the XML.
• Previously, if you used an API call to @mention a person whose username included a space (for example “John PhoneGuru”), the call would drop to the first matching name before the space (for example “John”). We have fixed this issue, and now the API @mention calls respect the spaces in usernames.