In this release, we’re excited to announce the GA of several exciting products and features that were shown at LiNC:

• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector integrates Lithium Communities with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Power BI to deliver a true social CRM solution that reduces service costs, improve agent efficiency and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Profile Plus creates a personalized experience for community users tailored to their interests, expertise, and preferences. It 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.
• Responsive for Developers enables customers who have the technical capability to migrate to Responsive on their own and perform customizations themselves.

We’ve also made other features enhancements based on customer feedback, such as the ability to revoke badges from users, changes to our out-of-the-box rank structure, and other enhancements.
Contact your Customer Success Manager for more information about these new products and features.

New features

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector GA
• Profile Plus GA
• Responsive for Developers GA
• Q&A (new responsive design)
• Tribal Knowledge Base (responsive support for TOC and article feedback)
• Additional Responsive UI enhancements
• Revoke badges
• Changes to default ranks for new communities
• Naming update from Lithium Social Web to Lithium Response
• API updates
• Deprecating JSONP support

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector

Last year at LiNC’15, we announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft Dynamics. Today, we are excited to unveil an integration that brings together peer-to-peer interactions from communities and workflows from CRM to deliver data-driven customer experiences. We partnered with Microsoft Dynamics to provide you a way to consolidate transactional data in CRM with behavioral and social data from online communities and social channels into one solution. What you get is a true social CRM that empowers your customer care agents to deliver better customer experiences with a more streamlined case management process. A true social CRM solution will help you reduce service costs, improve agent efficiency and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Integrating these two platforms gives you a tremendous edge in creating a seamless bidirectional collaboration experience between the online community and internal CRM workflows. The community still serves as the first line of defense where customers share information, knowledge, ideas with each other. However, customers can now escalate an issue directly from the community at the thread-level, which gets routed to Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a support case. From there, agents can perform case management within CRM and publish responses back to the community and to the customer either through a private message or posted as a reply to the original thread. Through this integration, customers no longer need to leave the community to open a support ticket and receive individual support. As a result, this will give them a more satisfying support experience and a stronger relationship with your brand through personalized responses.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector provides an integration solution to manage the Lithium entities to be synchronized with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and use the data in CRM to address the customer support issues  more efficiently than as separate entities.

Note: To use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector, you must be running Community Release 16.6 or later and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016.

Note: Microsoft Dynamics online requires these browsers.  

Learn more about the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector, including setup instructions and step-by-step instructions on how to escalate topics from the community and postback messages from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Profile Plus GA announcement

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.

With the 16.6 Release, Profile Plus in now generally available to all customers.

Learn more about Profile Plus. See API Updates for a summary of Profile Plus API support.

New Profile Plus features in this release

New component: Actionable Insights

The Actionable Insights component:

• Highlights topics of interests trending in the community
• Suggests additional topics of interests based on community users who share the same interests currently added in the user’s Profile Plus settings
• Shows leaderboards of top interest experts in the community based on the user’s signature topics selected in the Profile Plus Page

We recommend placing this topic on the Community Page.

Using parameters in XML View, you can choose to hide the section containing trending interests and suggested interests or the section showing the leaderboard.

Advisories and notes before enabling Profile Plus

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

• 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

Your Customer Success Manager will need to turn on Profile Plus, so please contact him or her to enable it.

When you make your request, 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.

Responsive for Developers GA announcement

We are proud to announce the general availability of Lithium Responsive for Developers.

Customers engage with your Lithium Community throughout the day whether they are on the go or relaxing at home. Lithium Responsive creates a common UI experience across all devices and is a significant update to the default Lithium look and feel, but still provides you with the same customization power and control you’re used to. Using Lithium Responsive, you can provide a consistent brand and user experience everywhere, ensuring a feature-rich community on all devices while still providing room for motivational elements, such as leaderboards, when on desktop. Learn about the benefits of going responsive, including increased engagement and a consistent experience.

Until now, Lithium Responsive has only been available via an engagement with our Lithium Services group. We're excited to announce that Lithium Responsive for Developers is now available to customers who want to lead their own responsive redesigns with their own development teams. It is important to note that moving to responsive is a development project and is not turnkey. It requires technical expertise and a dedicated project effort from your development team. Your Customer Success Manager (CSM) can help you assess the scope of your redesign project and what development and design resources you'll need to accomplish it.

Responsive for Developers includes:

• Tools in Lithium Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Tools in Studio
• Appropriate documentation

The Responsive for Developers documentation listed below is essential reading for anyone interested in moving to Lithium Responsive.

Responsive for Developers documentation:

• About Lithium Responsive
• Getting Started with Responsive for Developers
• Before you begin
• Skin architecture
• Feature versions and responsive
• Lithium Responsive Developer documentation

When moving to Lithium Responsive from a legacy (non-responsive) Lithium community, our Customer Operations team will perform several tasks for you behind the scenes. You can learn more about these tasks in Getting Started with Responsive for Developers.

Publishing responsive skins to production

When you publish your responsive skin to your production environment (for the first time and for any updates), you'll be publishing a precompiled version of the skin generated for you automatically by Lithium. You'll find this version in the versions tab. See Responsive skins and Sass compilation for details.

Q&A (new responsive design)

While building out and certifying the Q&A discussion style for Responsive, we took the opportunity to update the design. When you start typing in your question, you get a clear indicator if your question has been asked already:

 

When you click Continue to post your question, you get the normal text editor. After you post your question, the calls to action to Kudo, Me Too, or Answer the question are front and center:

 

While typing your answer, you can use the rich text editor as well as click Quote to use content from another source. Like other discussions styles, content is autosaved, which is now displayed more prominently on the page as you continue to work. Just click Post when you’re ready to post your answer.

 

When someone posts an answer you like, you can accept it as a solution. When you do, all users see that there is a correct answer to the question:

Tribal Knowledge Base (responsive support for TOC and article feedback)

In the 16.5 Release, we announced two new TKB features:

• Table of Contents support for TKB
• TKB article feedback

These two features are now fully supported on Lithium Responsive with the 16.6 Release.

Additional Responsive UI enhancements

If you participated in the beta for Responsive for Developers, you might notice some changes and improvements we made to the general look and feel of the Responsive design. Some of these changes are quite subtle, such as slight changes to the default fonts and colors used in iconography. Other changes, like those to the hero banner and board-level pages, actually move some of the page components around and are a bit more pronounced.

Improved hero banner

We have tightened up and moved around some of the components in the Community home page hero banner. Specifically, the banner doesn’t take up as much vertical space, and the Notifications, User, and Private Messages icons are now centered on the page:

 

Additionally, the user drop-down menu is much more compact and now includes icons for each menu item:

 

By default, the menu acts a drop-down at desktop and tablet breakpoints, and then switches to a slide-out menu on mobile devices. The order of the items in the list are controlled by the User Slide Out Menu page. To change the direction from which the components slides (right by default), set direction=”left” in XML view.

 

Finally, the Browse slide-out menu uses the standard, more compact “hamburger” icon:

 

In addition to providing a cleaner presentation, the UI remains more consistent between device types. Here’s the hero banner on a mobile device:

Modified board-level layout

For board-level pages, we tightened up the header, moved the search box above the board title, and provided a better breadcrumb so you know exactly where you are and can easily click back up through the community structure.

Revoke badges

Since we released the badges feature, one of the most common customer feature requests was the ability to revoke badges. From time to time, you might have users who game your community to be awarded badges they haven’t really earned are are awarded a badges accidentally. For these situations, you can now revoke badges from specific users.

Note: You must have the Revoke badges permission (Admin > Users > Permissions > badges) to be able to revoke a badge.

To revoke a user’s badge:

1. Sign in to the community as an admin or user with the Revoke badges permission.
2. Go to the user’s profile page.
3. In the Badges area, click View all to go to the user’s earned badges page.
4. Hover over the badge you want to revoke and click Revoke.
   
5. Confirm that you want to permanently revoke this badge. Revoked badges cannot be re-earned by the user.

Note: After you revoke the badge, it will not appear anywhere on the member’s profile page.

Un-revoking a badge

If you make a mistake and revoke the wrong badge or revoke a badge from the wrong user, you can manually un-revoke it from the Community Admin Badges area.

To un-revoke a badge:

1. Sign in as an admin.
2. Go to Admin > Users > Badges.
3. Click the Revoked Badges tab.
4. Hover over the row for the badge you want to un-revoke and click Un-revoke.
   
   
5. Click Yes to confirm that you want to grant this badge.

The un-revoked badge is immediately reflected in that user’s earned badges page in their profile.

Changes to default ranks for new communities

We have updated the list of default ranks provided with new Lithium communities. We have found that some administrators used the default ranks as-is, without considering if these rank names and criteria met the theme and goals for their community.

When setting up a new Lithium Community, you should review these out-of-the-box ranks and their associated ranking formula and decide which you want to include in your community rank structure. The default ranks use generic names (P1-P6 and A1-A15). For each rank you intend to use, you should change its name to reflect the personality of your community.

For example, if your brand is focused on music, you might want to reflect that theme in your ranks ("Beginner", "Rock Star", "Conductor"). Or, you might want to use more general rank names like "New Member", "Top Contributor", "Answer Guru", or "Esteemed Contributor" that reflect their status, contributions, and influence level on your community.

When you start a new Lithium community, your rank structure looks like this:

 

You should rename, edit, or delete any of these ranks to meet your specific needs before launching your site. Additionally, you can create new ranks before or after you launch your site. Learn more about ranks and ranking formulas.

Naming update from Lithium Social Web to Lithium Response

At LiNC this year, we changed the name of Lithium Social Web (LSW) to Lithium Response. With this change, we have updated all the Lithium Response product screens and documentation to reflect the new naming. Additionally, we have updated the Lithium Response tab in Community Admin to use Lithium Response:

 

API Changes

Coming soon: What’s new section in the Developer Documentation Portal

Look in a few weeks for a section called What’s New to the Developer Documentation Portal home page. This will give a summary of updates in the latest feature version and points you to those new features within the developer documentation.

Profile Plus APIs

We’ve added the klout_topics and social_score collections to the Community API v2 to support Profile Plus customization. We’ve also added related fields to users and messages collections. The Profile Plus APIs are designed to help you retrieve a user's topics of interest and areas expertise. Using LiQL, Community API v2, and FreeMarker, you can build components and other functionality to retrieve and display:

• Topics of interests by user ID
• Topic metadata, including whether a user is an expert on the topic, whether a user has whitelisted the topic, and whether the user has made the topic a signature topic
• Profile Plus details for users, such as Klout score, community score, and connection status
• Messages associated with specific topics of interest
• Users by topic of interest

We’ve provided component examples in Profile Plus API examples. 

Deprecating JSONP support

As mentioned in the 16.3 Release, we are removing the ability to use JSONP for cross site requests with the 16.6 Release. If you are using JSONP to access APIs across domains, you must migrate your customization to use Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing (CORS) to ensure it continues to work after upgrading to 16.6. Click here for more information on how to set up CORS by filing a support ticket.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have fixed the issue where the Private Messages navigation icon disappeared when users viewed a group page for a group they were not a member of. This issue occurred only when the Use the private messenger permission was set to Grant by default.
• We have fixed the issue where labels listed in the Labels component were being sorted by usage instead of being sorted alphabetically. The Labels component now lists the labels in the proper order, alphabetically.
• Previously, if an idea had a large number of comments (more than defined by Linear Format: Posts per page when viewing a topic for the user), the Single Idea page only displayed the first n comments and there was no way to navigate to the remaining comments because the pagination control for comments is missing. We have fixed this display issue have been fixed, and you can now navigate to the next page of comments.
• We have fixed the display issue where transparent .gif images were being displayed with a white background. These images now display properly with no background color.
• Previously, if you set up custom content filters, the filters were not being applied to user settings (like signature). They were only being applied to messages. You can now add the user option to the Apply this filter to field for custom filters so the filter can apply to user settings under My Settings.