Forum Discussion

Gursimrat's avatar
Gursimrat
Leader
11 years ago

Setting up a new community from scratch with basic features

Hi,

 

We have a new requirement and need to know following which are relavent in the new forums we will be handling in few weeks time.

 

1. About setup:

  • How is a lithium community build up from ground up. How much time does a new community require to setup?
  • or, How is a community migrated from other platforms, such as Jive, VBulletin etc. We have our community migrated from Jive, but all the migration was done by lithium and we were not involved in that, is it always that the Lithium engineers migrate the community contents?

2. About the Knowledgebase

  • How is a new TKB in lithium is created, I read few threads before posting this and came accross that it needs to be enabled and is chargeable seprately, is it so?
  • or, How do we migrate our current knwoledge base from other sources such as Wordpress, Joomla, Zendesk etc. to TKB in lithium, also, does lithium handles all the migration here or do we have any access/options to migration of TKB?
  • Any documentation regarding "how to get started with TKB"?

3. Search

  • I see 2 versions of search available in Lithium admin, called 2.0 and 1.0, what is different in both?
  • Can we customize this lithium search or serve our results in addition to the lithiums results?

4. Mobile Version

  • By default, lithium has a tabbed version of the mobile site, which is very basic in comparison to the desktop site. Is there a way that tabular design can be overriden to have a much visually apealing mobile version of the community? I am not saying that we always want to show the desktop version in mobile, but a mobile version which is not a tabbed site.

5. Ticketing system

  • I have seen some threads on the support ticketing on lithosphere, does lithium have any dedicated support ticketing system? And documention for this?

 

Thanks

1 Reply

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  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    11 years ago

    Hi Gursimrat ,

     

    I will answer what i can and i am sure others will fill in the gaps:

     

    1. Professional Services will do most of the work in terms of the migration and provisioning of your platforms however depending on how much skinning you want to do you could find yourself doing very little or spending months on it. IF your going with something "out the box" then you will only really need to spend time on some of the basic config, rank structure, roles ect. Obviously if you want something that is very "on-brand" for you then its going to take longer

    • I migrated a vb community to Li, was very easy and straight forward and i would expect jive to be no different, you will need to help with some of the field mapping and also validation and testing following the initial and 2nd db migrations, no two migrations are the same and depending on what you have and do in your jive community may need to do a little more or less work but its not a big effort on your part. 
    • Not sure if you have a ranking in your existing community but you will need to tweak your Li ranking to match that or adjust to ensure you dont have all your migrated users on the same rank and struggling to rank up.

     

    2. TKB is chargeable but very worthwhile having, if you dont have this in your package then it wont be enabled nor with your articles get migrated unless you have agreed for them to be migrated into your community boards. 

     

    3. Not 100% so wont comment for risk of giving wrong advice

     

    4. Mobile does have some limitations that the desktop doesn't but that said its just another skin which if you are taking the time to build a desktop community that is on-brand then you will also need to factor in a skin for your mobile site, the mobile site will inherit some of the desktop skin but in my experience if you leave the mobile skin and hope for the best it will end up broken so make sure you take the time to do a proper mobile skin. 

     

    5. Lithium have their own case management system but this is for their clients who use lithosphere, allowing us to raise cases via the community for issues with out own Li environments, not 100% but i think they actually use salesforce to manage this. Lithium doesn't have its own ticketing system as a tool or service for you to deploy but you can easily "with some dev" achieve this. Appreciate you may not be using it but it you are a salesforce user there is a great integration between lithium and sfdc which would let you raise cases, that said if you already had a case management tool in your business "i would imagine" you could adapt to link into your Li community.

     

    How far into the process are you? All if not most of the above should be made clear to you in your SOW and with that the 3 tracks of building your community and R&R should be outlined. 

     

    The launch services guys are great and should be able to answer all questions and confirm best ways to achieve your given goals. 

     

    Thanks