Khoros Support Contingency Plan
Khoros is committed to providing ongoing coverage regardless of natural disaster or crisis (regional or global). Our customers need to be able to work with our team regardless of the situation or region. Therefore, our support organization is prepared and built with redundancy to absorb any short term impact from unpredictable causes. In the event that any individual Khoros office is impacted by a threat that results in the actual or effective shutdown of said office--for example, from potential Coronavirus impacts--we have the following contingencies in place for all products and levels of support, including Technical Account Management, Severity 1 Outage, and standard support: Regional Coverage Support is located in a number of locations including Austin, Bangalore, London and Portland. Any location may be called up to work 24/7/365 to cover for an office that is impacted. Remote Staffing In addition to our office locations, we have remote staff members that can be deployed to work 24/7/365 to augment existing offices. Work From Home All locations are empowered to immediately enact a temporary work from home policy, allowing our entire support staff to continue to work with limited impact. We will continue to evaluate the need for any additional contingencies based on business or customer requirements.Working with Khoros during Major Events
We know that there are events that specific communities consider "major" for their business -- whether this is the Superbowl , Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a live event, a new product launch, a relaunch of your design, a demo for executives, or any one of a dozen other scenarios, it is our goal to work with you to ensure that events are as seamless as possible. Outages Khoros is committed to ensuring that you are supported 24/7/365 on any outages. We have a comprehensive guide to outages and information about our general status page available for you to take a look at, but the summary of this is that if you or your customer's are down or unable to work, let us know and we'll quickly take a look to see what's going on! You can always keep up to date on our status page where we do our best to provide insight to outages impacting multiple customers. Being Proactive Assuming you know ahead of time that you have a major event coming up, please let us know as early as possible - at least a week - if not more - is ideal! Although we have monitoring in place to help mitigate issues as best as possible, the best situation is where we can proactively review allocated resources, your server side setup, and make sure that there simply aren't any issues! Reaching Out If you have a Technical Account Manager or CSM, please make sure that they and Support are aware of your impending event so that they can pay attention to it. If you don't, don't despair! Open a support case letting our team know that you have an event coming, what the date and time of it is and that you'd like us to take a look to see if there's anything that needs to be done to help prevent an impact on you or your customers. If you can add Proactive to the case subject, it'll help us organize the solution as well. Depending on need and contracted level of support, this may require some additional conversations to figure out what is necessary to help you be successful. The above applies to whether you're a Care, Communities, Marketing, or JX customer!Guide to reporting issues
So you've launched a subscription with one of our products and ran into an issue or have a question that you couldn't find the answer for on this community. Don't fret - we've got you covered! It's our mission to ensure your support experience is seamless and effortless. If you have access to the Case Portal, you might have noticed a lot of fields on the new case submission page. Why is all of this information necessary / required? We understand that not everything you submit to us will merit this information. For example, if you have a simple request or a question, providing steps to replicate or describing the expected and actual behavior may not be relevant. However, the more information you can provide from the start, the faster your experience will be. For all service requests, whether to report a defect or simply a question, there are some fields that will help us solve for your query more effectively. Subject - Just a brief summary, a tweet if you will, about the request Description - Here's where your novel goes, with the entirety of the request Customer Priority - By default, this is "normal" but sometimes there's a High or Low priority request. These should be compared to your others, meaning 90% of your request would typically be "Normal" in priority. Severity - These are contractual levels, but take a look at our Support Page for some definitions. This is a field you can't change once submitted, but our support team can if appropriate. When reporting a defect or issue to Khoros Support, please provide the following information: URL of Khoros Product and/or URL(s) of where the problem occurs Steps to Reproduce Expected Behavior Actual Behavior Browser and OS Username, Roles, or Ranks When asking a question or making a request to Khoros Support, please provide the following information: Subject Description / Request / Question URL of Khoros Product Providing the above will eliminate the chance for any confusion or unnecessary back-and-forth that may lengthen the time your case stays open. On a final note, a picture is worth a thousand words - if you're able to attach screenshots to your case submission, it will be extremely helpful to the team in getting your case moved along even faster. And if a picture is worth a thousand words... a video is worth a million! If the issue you're experiencing is intermittent or rather involved, capture it on a quick video. There are several applications out there that offer video capturing of your screen - Jing is a great free tool to try and works on both PC and Mac.Help Us Help You!
Dear Customer, You're looking to create a case because you've encountered a technical issue, would like a request to be completed, or have some other information you would like to receive. You would like to have your case completed as quickly as possible and so would we! While we can't always guarantee things will be resolved quickly depending on the nature of an issue, there are some things you can do to help move things along proactively! We've compiled some common requests for details that our Support team often asks for below with respect to each product Khoros offers, as well as some tips on things you can do to help focus the team's efforts on the right things. If you could provide this information when creating your case that would help move the request along, as it will eliminate some back and forth and allow our team to move forward and ask more targeted questions if more information is needed on top of what was already provided (sometimes this may be necessary). Some of this information may not always be relevant or available (e.g.: if you want to enable a new Community feature we probably won't need a HAR file), but please try to provide as much as you can! Care Community Marketing Care Care is a single-page web application that allows a lot of social media integrations. We have put up a list of scenarios with a set of information that the support team might require to investigate that scenario. Please be thorough while describing the issue you are facing. The clearer you are, the easier it will be for the Support team to step through the issue in the same way that you are. This includes filling out the "Steps to reproduce", "Expected Behavior", and "Actual Behavior" fields in detail. Including the steps you took can be very helpful. If the issue is regarding content(post) not ingesting into the Care application then it would be helpful to provide us with the following links: Native links of the original posts Screenshots to the native posts If the issue is regarding the user being unable to log in, then it would be important to provide the following information: Users email address Screenshots of the error while attempting to login How many users are unable to log in, is it specific to a set of users or all users? If the issue is that the content is ingesting with a delay then you can provide us with the following information Conversation ids where the delay was noticed. 2. The Social media handle name. 3. Is the delay in ingestion experienced for all the conversations from that specific social media handle or a different social media handle. If the issue is regarding conversations falling in an incorrect work queue, then you can provide us with the following information: Conversation ids that were incorrectly routed. Name of the work queue where the conversation should have been routed. Were any recent changes done to the work queues or the tags? If there were changes done then what were those changes. If the issue is related to user permissions and some of the roles aren’t reflected even after saving the user profile, please provide us with the following information: User email address. Screenshot of the error if any error pops up. How many other users are seeing a similar issue? Are the user permissions managed via any identity provider or do they login via SSO? If the care app appears to be slow, the following information would be absolutely necessary and important How many users are experiencing slowness is it specific to a group of users? If it is specific to a group of users are they located in the same geographic location. Is there a specific screen in the care application where the slowness is being experienced or it is with the overall application? Is the behavior consistent across different browsers too? Do you use any VPN to access the application? Were there any recent changes done to the network on your end? What exactly happens when you experience slowness on the application. Back to top Community The Community application is large and complex, carrying a number of different features and configuration options, as well as numerous avenues for customization. Here are some things to consider both while you are filing a case for anything Community related or perhaps while trying to review an issue on your own prior to creating a case: Technical issues: Please be thorough while describing the issue you are facing. The clearer you are, the easier it will be for the Support team to step through the issue in the same way that you are. This includes filling out the "Steps to reproduce", "Expected Behavior", and "Actual Behavior" fields in detail. Please also bear in mind that some communities are customized to add configuration options or pages that may not be present on any other community, so including steps to reach the page(s) you were looking at or how you obtained a certain piece of output can be very helpful! For example, if you are getting an error while trying to post, we would prefer that you describe the behavior as something like "When I try to submit a post I receive an error with this text: texthere" as opposed to something like "When I try to submit a post it doesn't work". From a backend perspective, "doesn't work" could mean a number of different things, so being as descriptive as possible in all fields will give the team a better picture of what is happening and allow them to focus their efforts. When possible, please try to confirm if an issue occurs in all of your environments (stage, production, preproduction) as well. We understand that not all issues can be tested everywhere for a variety of reasons, but it is helpful to know what you see in all of your environments for comparison purposes. Please include full URLs to the page(s) you would like us to pay attention to. The more specific the URL is, the better. You may already have these URLs open while creating your case as well and it is likely it will take less time to copy and paste them in the field for URLs than it would for someone from the Support team to track them down on their own. This also helps ensure the team is looking at the right instance(s), which can be especially important if you have more than one instance or refer to your communities in a different way than the Khoros team does internally. For example, "dev" is a common reference to stage instances among customers, but internally, we don't have any customer environments that are referred to as "dev", so this can cause confusion that can be solved by linking to the specific instance(s) you would like us to focus on. Please try to provide timestamps wherever possible. The log files for the Community application are very large and contain a lot of information about various things that happen in an individual community, so having something to focus on is extremely helpful. Please remember to include the timezone for any timestamps you provide. One person's 1 pm is another person's 1 am, so leaving out the timezone could lead to any results being off by several hours for a task where even a couple of seconds could make a difference. Screenshots and videos are also very helpful when trying to communicate an issue! For any screenshots or videos you provide, please try to include the full screen (including the address bar and taskbar with the clock visible). If you need to draw focus to a specific part of the page, please consider using a highlighter or other drawing tools rather than cropping the image. For technical issues where a problem occurs, a HAR file is often helpful. Please see this article for more information on HAR files and the steps to generate them. For any HAR files you provide, please try to start capturing traffic from start to finish - that is, start capturing traffic before you attempt to reproduce the issue and continue to capture traffic until the issue has been reproduced. Please try to give a meaningful name to any files you attach to a case. It is much easier to tell at a glance what "board-with-error.png" is for than it is when the filename is something along the lines of "image1.png". This becomes increasingly appreciated and helpful as more files are attached over time. Please try to reference specific users that the Support team can look at for any issues that occur, even if all users may be impacted. Having some sample users to look at can be useful for comparison purposes and for looking information up in our logs. Please try to provide a link to the user's profile, as this will help reduce confusion and ensure that we're looking at the right user (example of a profile URL: https://community.khoros.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1) Please consider things that may have changed recently, both on and off of the community. For example, if a deployment using Self Publish was recently carried out and something no longer works correctly, this is both helpful for the Support team and for you to consider as well as something to look into on your end. Along the same lines, changes in the community can be relevant as well. For example, if your community uses SSO and your SSO team makes a change, that may be relevant if SSO suddenly stops working. Having information like this from the start helps focus the team's efforts. Some other specific things that may be worth considering depending on the issue you are facing (but not limited to) are Community Admin panel changes, DNS changes your to community's hostname, deployments carried out by Khoros teams that you are aware of (e.g.: Services engagements, new features, upgrades), and changes to your authentication workflow (either on your side or on the Community side). Please try to include when the issue started if you have an idea of when something last worked differently. This is similar to the previous point in that you will generally have more experience with what you need and want your specific community to do, so knowing when something last worked differently can be extremely helpful in tracking down what may be causing an issue even if you aren't aware of any specific changes that might have been made. Please consider trying to reproduce any issues you encounter in a separate browser or using a private/incognito browsing session or on a different device if one is available. Some issues are specific to individual browser operating systems or may be caused by add-ons/programs specific to your computer, so taking this step can help rule things like that out. For connectivity and performance issues, please consider trying to reproduce the issue on a different network (e.g.: if you normally use a corporate VPN, try turning it off or using your cell phone). This can help rule out network issues as a cause of any issues you run into. Please note that in cases where a specific network has an issue, it is likely the team will recommend reaching out to the network owner, so you may want to consider doing this proactively as well. For any API calls you are using (either manually or through custom code/automation), please provide the full API call exactly as it is being made. You can scrub any session key information, but please try to keep the exact call intact and include any headers or query parameters you are using. In cases where you are using code to make the API call, please consider sharing that source code as well. The Support team generally cannot debug your custom code, but it can be helpful for us to get an idea of what it is doing and where. For display issues or script errors, the Support team will typically try to test an issue by changing the skin the page is using to an out-of-the-box (OOTB) skin to try and narrow down the scope of the issue. This may be something you want to try on your own as well. This can be accomplished by going to the Admin Panel -> Display -> Skins -> Select one of the OOTB skins (White UI or Responsive Peak) and save changes. If you are going to do this, we recommend doing so on stage or in a private area in your community, as the OOTB skins will look very different from your branded skin and this could cause confusion for your end-users. In cases where changing the skin appears to resolve the problem, the Support team may ask you to reach out to your internal teams to look into the issue. You may want to consider doing that proactively as well in order to review any changes that may have been made. Requests to enable features or for information: For any requests to enable features, if you happen to have the documentation available to point to that would be appreciated! We understand if you don't have it on hand when creating a case, but if you do happen to have it open, it helps ensure that everyone is looking at the same thing. Though not often as relevant to these types of cases, filling out the "Steps to reproduce", "Expected behavior", and "Actual behavior" fields can still be very helpful in ensuring that the team focuses their efforts on what it is you're interested in. Back to top Marketing Technical Issues: Please be thorough while describing the issue you are facing. The clearer you are, the easier it will be for the Support team to step through the issue in the same way that you are. This includes filling out the "Steps to reproduce", "Expected Behavior", and "Actual Behavior" fields in detail. Including the steps you took can be very helpful. For example, if you are getting an error while trying to post, we would prefer that you describe the behavior as something like "When I try to schedule or save a post I receive an error with this text: texthere" as opposed to something like "When I try to submit a post it doesn't work". From a backend perspective, "doesn't work" could mean a number of different things, so being as descriptive as possible in all fields will give the team a better picture of what is happening and allow them to focus their efforts. Screenshots and videos are also very helpful when trying to communicate an issue! For any screenshots or videos you provide, please try to include the full screen (including the address bar). This will provide more details as to where you are in the platform. If you need to draw focus to a specific part of the page, please consider using a highlighter or other drawing tools rather than cropping the image. For technical issues where a problem occurs, a HAR file and console logs are often helpful. Please see this article for more information on HAR files/console logs and the steps to generate them. For any files you provide, please try to start capturing traffic from start to finish - that is, start capturing traffic before you attempt to reproduce the issue and continue to capture traffic until the issue has been reproduced. Please consider trying to reproduce any issues you encounter in a separate browser or using a private/incognito browsing session or on a different device if one is available. Some issues are specific to individual browser operating systems or may be caused by add-ons/programs specific to your computer, so taking this step can help rule things like that out. Please try to reference specific users that the Support team can look at for any issues that occur, even if all users may be impacted. Please include details on how this impacts your daily workflow. Whether the issue is intermittent or happening all the time. Is this preventing you from completing a task. If so, is there a deadline you need to complete this by? For access-related issues please review the Admin FAQ. If you are unsure who your admin is, support can look up your admin who can provide you with the appropriate access. Specific to Marketing: For Calendar posts or Ads provide Message ID. To locate the message ID click on the post to open the side pane then click on the basics tab under Khoros ID copy the message:xxxxxxx. The name of the initiative the post/ad is in If the post includes media provide the original image/video file For Inbox items provide A screenshot of the item The name of the stream/collection or topic queue the item is in The name of the initiative the item is in For Analytics provide A full-page screenshot of the dashboard. Include the date ranges and any filters that are applied. Attach data exports For Mobile provide The name of the app, Device information (Android or iOS) Which OS version you are on Mobile app version. If you are not on the latest version of the app you may need to delete and re-download the app. For API provide Curl. This should include the token and the request/body being made. Text or screenshot of errors returned Back to top As mentioned earlier, we may still need to ask for additional information depending on the nature of the case. However, by providing any of the above information when you can, we can hopefully move your case towards a satisfactory resolution quickly! We hope you have found the above information useful and we appreciate you sticking with us until the end of this article! As always, please don't hesitate to reach out and let us know if you have any questions or concerns! Sincerely, The Khoros Support TeamHow do I close a support case that's been resolved?
When you have an open support case, you will be able to see a new button on the case details page with the option to Close case. Once you are happy that your support case has been resolved you can click on the button, which will trigger a popup box confirming that you would like to close out your case with the support team. Once you have closed your support case you will be able to find it in the Resolved tab in the Case Portal. Note: If you wish to let us know why you are closing your case, please feel free to leave a comment on the case before closing. You may also receive a survey after the case is closed.What is Khoros's Bug Process?
Question What is Khoros's Bug Process? Answer Khoros handles all incoming issues through our Support team. Our article on how to report an issue is available here. During the triage and troubleshooting process, Khoros may identify a particular issue as a bug within the system. At this juncture, we notify affected customer(s) with as much information as possible and that the issue has been identified as a bug. Our support team continues to be the primary point of contact for you and we leave the case open until the bug has either been resolved (after confirmation with the customer), deferred, or identified as a ‘won’t fix’. As a SaaS company, Khoros is not always able to commit to resolving certain bugs. However, we do commit to provide communication as quickly as possible. In addition to this, we may defer a bug to an indefinite date when a specific feature comes up for rewrite. Throughout the lifecycle of an open bug, Khoros support continues to communicate the current status as best as possible along with any confirmed timelines. Initially, Khoros does not commit to specific timeframes for bug fixes, but when the issue is clarified or placed on a Sprint for completion we will be able to provide a date for the release that the bug will be in. Here are a few reasons why we're unable to specify timeframes when addressing bugs: Our bug-vetting process is thorough, complex and in-depth. This is a simplification of our process — but bugs are first triaged, then they're categorized as potential fixes based on a ranking of criteria: The complexity of the issue How widespread the issue is How many similar issues to this have been reported and are sitting in the backlog, etc. In addition to our bug-vetting process, we also have to take into account: Any overlapping fixes or new features that have been checked into a pending release Any overlapping fixes or new features that are in an upcoming future release How this issue integrates into our overall QA process to prevent recurring issues When we take all of these factors into account, it becomes impossible for us to provide an initial timeframe even on something that may appear to be a simple fix. In all cases, Khoros partners with our customers to understand business impact which helps us prioritize issues across our customer base in a more effective manner. For customers that have Premium support, this is completed through the Technical Account Manager.HTTPS encryption migration guide + FAQ
In 2018 Khoros is moving all customer sites to SSL encryption (HTTPS) to safeguard customer data. HTTPS encrypts all data passed between the end user and your community. Khoros is ready to work with you to enable, test, and deploy a SSL certificate, to bring your community to full HTTPS delivery. We will also be sending out email notifications to our customers over the next month and a half as a reminder on this. These changes will result in: all pages/resources will be served over HTTPS in production all pages/resources will be served over HTTPS in stage requests for pages/resources/apis over HTTP will be redirected to their HTTPS equivalents Note that the steps below follow Khoros Standard SSL deployment. Access to Standard SSL deployment is included with existing customer licenses (is free). To get started, we ask that you follow the following steps. Open a support ticket: Please open a support ticket via the case portal so that the support team can begin the process. If you have a technical resource on your side who can assist, please be sure to include them on the CC list when creating the case. Certificate Procurement or Updates: If your community is not utilizing any form of SSL, Khoros Support will add your domain to the Khoros SAN SSL Certificate and prepare your community for HTTPS migration. If you already have SSL enabled but in partial mode, you’ll be transitioned over to full-site SSL. Studio Review (Plugin Layer): Khoros Support will review your plugin and attempt to convert any hard-coded community HTTP paths to either use a relative path or HTTPS. More complicated asset updates will be flagged and communicated to your technical contact or may need a services engagement. Community Admin Updates: While Support will handle the plugin transition, you will need to handle any hard-coded paths contained within the Community admin panel. This includes the announcement sections and custom content modules. If you had customization work done through Khoros Professional Services, you may have a Settings List Editor section in your admin that will also need to be updated if it contains any fields created for URL’s. Review on Staging: Once the plugin updates are completed and the certificate procured/updated, you will need to test and review your staging instance. If there’s any problems, please inform support. If there are no problems, we’ll then move on to scheduling the changes for production: Schedule your Production Deployment: Support will coordinate with you a production HTTPS deployment during a normal maintenance period. FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions Why is Khoros switching to HTTPS now? Major browser and search vendors are making changes to flag pages that are delivered over HTTP as 'not secure' after July 2018. Obviously, this kind of message is not one you want associated with your brand. HTTPS is also a factor in search engine ranking. It's presumed that search vendors will add additional weight to HTTPS in their ranking formula this year. What if part of my community is delivered over HTTPS already? For customers using "mixed mode", Khoros will work with you to enable full site HTTPS using the existing SSL certificate. The steps required on your part are identical for customers using mixed mode. Can I wait? Not for much longer. Khoros is phasing out support for HTTP communities after 18.7, following best practices and maintaining our commitment to securing customer data. Can I generate my own certificate? Contact support or your account team for alternative SSL certificate scenarios. Note that alternative scenarios generally carry a charge and require an engagement (SOW). We typically advise against this direction. What about external domains? Anything hosted on the community will support HTTPS. However, any references to external domains will require that those domains be under SSL. If you’re using an external asset and the domain does not support HTTPS, we recommend that you upload the asset to your community via studio then update the reference code/URL. What is a SAN SSL certificate? See the What is the SAN SSL certificate? Article. What are the benefits of using SSL (HTTPS encryption)? See the Full HTTPS Encryption for all Communities article. Thank you for your time and we look forward to working with you to migrate you to HTTPS!
