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Release Notes
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Khoros Communities 20.11 Release Notes

JohnD's avatar
JohnD
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
4 years ago

New Features

Events (GA)

In the 20.10 Release Notes, we announced Early Access for our new discussion style, Events. We are excited to announce that Events is now in General Availability (GA).

Note: Events is a paid feature but is included by default in certain community packages. To learn whether Events is included in your package or costs extra as well as request to have it enabled for your community, contact your Khoros Account Executive.

Note: With the GA release, we provide API updates. While the front-end feature is called Events in the Community UI and feature documentation, the APIs and API documentation use the term occasions.

Learn more about Events.

Slack Integration (GA)

In the 20.10 Release Notes, we announced Early Access for our Slack integration with the community. We are excited to announce that Slack integration is now in General Availability (GA) and enabled by default for all communities.

Khoros Communities offers a Slack integration app that acts as a bridge between Slack and your community. Using the app, your employees can perform light-weight, common community tasks from within Slack.

From the Community by Khoros Slack App, you can:

  • Receive notifications
  • Perform immediate actions (reply, kudo)
  • Run simple community searches

Learn more about setting up and using the Community by Khoros Slack app and participating in your community via Slack.

Content Workflow and Approval improvements for Blogs and TKBs (EA)

We are excited to announce the release of  a new content workflow system to publish blogs and Tribal Knowledge Bases (TKBs). Blogs v3 and TKB v4 introduces a 3-step content-creation workflow that provides for authoring, editing and publishing.

Note: You must open a support ticket to enable this feature.

Content Workflow and Approval is the biggest change to the blogs and TKB discussion styles in several years and have been redesigned to focus on collaboration and usability.

You now have more granular control over author, editor, and publisher permissions, enabling you to clearly define who can perform each task in the publishing workflow. 

Each blog or TKB article moves through different states and are assigned to members with specific roles. Thus, members always know what state an article is in, when it’s their turn to work on the content, and what they must do to move the article to the next step in the publishing workflow.

This flowchart shows how an article moves through the publishing workflow and the  tasks members with specific roles can perform.

 

Content workflow and approval provides these blog and TKB enhancements:

  • Granular Permissions: More robust permission structure to support different content roles Author, Editor, Publisher for different purposes create, review and publish respectively.
  • Dashboard improvements: Improved article dashboard to track an article’s journey in the publishing workflow and make it easier to take relevant actions.

  • Draft History view: A new component to track every action performed on an article until it is published. This records what action was done by whom and at what date and time.

  • Compare two versions of a draft or published articles: Compare any two versions when the article is in the workflow process or after the article is published. The highlights show the differences between two versions of a draft or article.

  • Internal comments: Provision to add internal notes for the article between the members collaborating on the draft.

  • Notifications: Email Notifications to relevant community members at every stage in the Workflow. 

Learn more about Content Workflow and Approval improvements for Blogs and TKB.

Email Metrics (GA)

We now include the Email metrics feature in Community Analytics provides a set of key metrics that track the journey of an email from the moment it gets triggered in the community to the recipient opening and clicking on a community link in the email.

Community Managers can measure the effectiveness of email notifications and take appropriate action to get the most of these triggered emails.

To benefit from this feature, your community must:

Learn more about Email metrics. 

Billing Metrics (EA)

We are happy to announce the early access to Billing Metrics which provides more transparency to the metrics related to the billing of your community contract. By making Billing Metrics available in Community Analytics, you can easily access how your billing-related metrics trend against the contractual tier of your Community.

Note: Reach out to your CSM to join the EA program.

The Billing metrics shows the current usage against the contractual tier limits for the metrics subscribed to in the contract as per Salesforce data. Metrics also show the timeline view of usage of all the metrics subscribed to in the contract.


Learn more about Billing Metrics.

Spam-related summary metrics in Community Analytics

The Summary view will now have the Spam metrics. In the Summary view you can view these two measures as SPAM TOPICS and MARKED NOT SPAM TOPICS.


Filter for new posts in Community Analytics

A filter for new Topics is now available in Community Analytics. This new filter (New Topics) considers only Topics created within the time period you select to compute the metrics and also to generate the CSV export. 

Note: This filter is available only for the Topics discussion style.

Multi-Factor Authentication (EA)

Khoros now provides support for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to secure community access for users with privileged access rights (usually Admins). Enforcing an additional layer of security helps prevent unauthorized account access.

After MFA is enabled for a community, the system mandates all privileged users (identified on the basis of certain elevated user permissions) to have this additional level of authentication to access the community. These users must:

  • complete a one-time MFA setup for their account and add their account in an authenticator app
  • provide a verification code generated by the authenticator app, in addition to the username and password for signing into the community.

NoteAs of now, MFA support is available only for non-SSO communities. To enable MFA for your community, open a Support ticket.

Learn more about MFA.

Comments List Syndication (GA)

In 20.10, we announced EA of Comments List Syndication, our latest Community Syndication component. Comments List Syndication is released as GA as of Community release 20.11 and will be enabled for all customers by default. 

This syndication component supports simple SSO authentication flows (LithiumSSO and SAML). Authentication flows including additional levels of authentication, like multifactorial authentication, are not supported.

Learn more in About Comments List Syndication.

The GA release includes support of a new Comments List Syndication skin, based on our Responsive Skin. The Comments List Syndication skin is much leaner than the Responsive skin. We recommend basing your custom Comments List styling on the Comments List Syndication skin to improve load time performance of the component.

A Comments List component uses the Comments List Syndication skin. You can create a custom version of this skin in Studio in order to match the look and feel of your Comments List to your brand's guidelines. See Comments List development and testing for more information.

Also, see our new Comments List FAQ.

API Updates

We've updated LiQL support to retrieve owners and members from membership nodes, as well as introduced a new Occasions API to support the Events feature.

Updated LiQL support to retrieve group hub members by membership role

We have updated how to retrieve members from membership nodes by their membership role. (At this time, group hubs are the only node type that supports memberships. Group hub membership roles include: Member, Curator, Inviter, Owner) We added the grouphub.id constraint to the users collection as a simpler, more reliable way to retrieve users from group hubs. 

We recommend using these new constraints to retrieve owners and members. 

To get members of a group hub:

SELECT id, login from users where grouphub.id = <groupHubId>

To get members of a group hub by their role in the group hub:

SELECT id,login FROM users WHERE grouphub.id = <groupHubId> and roles.name = 'Owner'

Note: Prior to 20.11, you would use queries like these to get members and owners:

SELECT id,login FROM users WHERE node.id = <nodeType>:<nodeId>

SELECT id,login FROM users WHERE node.id = <nodeType>:<nodeId> AND roles.name = 'Owner'

These legacy queries are still supported.

Create an abuse report for a private message

You can now create an abuse report with Community API v2 using a POST request to /api/2.0/threaded_notes/{threaded_note_id}/abuse_reports. This equivalent to selecting Report as Inappropriate from the Options menu in the Community UI. The request triggers an abuse report notification message that will appear in the Board ID set in the Board ID for private message abuse reports setting in Community Admin > Mod Tools > Abuse Notification

Note that the abuse report created cannot be queried with the /search endpoint or retrieved by ID. 

This API is supported with Private Messages v3 only. Learn more about Private Messages feature versions.

Events (Occasions) API support

Khoros is introducing API support for creating and managing Event messages through the Occasions API. 

As "events" is a common development term, we've decided to brand Event Messages as Occasions on the back end. From a functional and data standpoint, Events and Occasions are the same thing. The only difference is how you are interacting with them at the time, either through the front end (Events) or API (Occasions).

The API allows for parity with the Communities Events feature which enables the creation and management of Events, invitations, RSVPs, etc.

New API Endpoints:

Updates to Existing API Endpoints:

In addition to support through our API, we have added several new LiQL collections enabling you to retrieve information about Occasions, guests, and more.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

  • We have fixed the display issue where the "Change Node" modal window (Community Admin > "choose") was not usable if the community included a very large number of nodes..
  • We have fixed an issue in the page initialization script that caused some redirect loops in the 20.8 release.
  • When using Forums v5, members who enabled the Automatically subscribe me to all topics or reviews I participate in setting under Profile settings > Notification Settings were not being auto-subscribed to those discussions and as a result did not receive any email notifications unless they manually selected the Email me when someone replies option for the thread. This issue has been fixed and members are now auto-subscribed when this setting is selected.
  • We have fixed the issue where the Group Hubs Activity Feed was not being populated for 20.8 communities.
  • Previously in Chrome or Firefox, you could not resize the Endpoints or Macros text boxes in Studio. This issue had been fixed, and you can resize these text boxes like you can in other areas of the application.
  • To meet accessibility requirements, we have made changes to ensure that <iframe> and <frame> page elements are not empty and include unique title attributes.
Updated 5 months ago
Version 11.0