As you may have noticed, we've given the communities at Jive a big overhaul.

We've been so busy building out the Supportal (have you see that beast yet? our very own support team built it and maintains it), thinking about Clearspace 3.0, and helping our customers build, deploy and grow awesome communities based on Clearspace that we haven't had the time to make our community the best that it can be. So a small group of us have been meeting clandestinely (well, not really all that secretly but it's more fun when you think about it that way) to see what we could do to make this community better. We spent a couple hours trying to figure out what was important to you (mostly getting quick resolutions to the problems that you sometimes run into with Clearspace, sometimes requesting new features or discussion improvements to existing features and last but not least, getting help building widgets, SSO integrations and plugins) and then we took a look at the vast number of spaces and groups and blogs and gum wrappers (kidding) that were strewn all over the community.  It was dirty, we admit it.

But that's all in the past. Old-timers (it's only been about 18 months!) here will remember the name Jivespace used to be reserved solely for the Developer and Plugin areas.  We'll now use the name Jivespace to refer to all communities hosted at jivesoftware.com.  There are now only four distinct areas:

• Support - Ask technical questions.  If you have a current support contract, you will also have a private community in addition to the public forums.
  
• Features - Talk to the Jive product team about current features or what should be on the road map.
  
• Developers - Access developer documentation and tips, and ask questions.
  
• Plugin Downloads - Download plugins supplied by either the community or Jive.

But the same spirit remains: as we embark on the next phase of Jivespace, we're looking to you to tell us what you need.  We promise we'll be listening.

New releases today: 10/22/08

Downloads are available via your purchases page

Clearspace 2.5.3

Full Documentation

This version of Clearspace has added support for Italian and Japanese languages, Weblogic 9.2 Application Server and MS SQL 2005 Database Server

Clearspace 2.0.9

Full Documentation

Clearspace 1.10.15

Full Documentation

You can expect the next release of Clearspace in roughly 4 weeks.

You can download the latest version from your purchases page.

Clearspace 2.5.2 Release Notes

• Full Documentation

Clearspace 2.0.8 Changelog

• Full Documentation

Clearspace 1.10.14 Changelog

• Full Documentation

The next set of maintenance updates are currently scheduled for release in approximately 4 weeks.

Over the past months we have come to the realization that when it comes to severity of your cases it really comes down to 3 levels:

1. Critical

Either your production site is down (cannot be accessed) or there is a problem affecting the users in such a way that the site is unusable. This includes (but is not limited to) events like: Cannot post a discussion, cannot add a comment to a blog post, cannot login, etc.

When events like this happen, please reach out to Support as soon as possible to quickly get things assesed and corrected. The easiest way to do that is to create a case in your support community, and choose the severity 'Critical.'

2. Medium

While a Medium Severity issue may still be happening on your production site, it only has minor business impact, resulting in some functionality loss.  This can include (again, not limited to) things such as formatting errors, page layout issues, webservices bugs, etc. We know there is sometimes a fine line between medium and critical issues, but we trust you to use your best judgement. If we perceive an issue as mis-categorized, we may change the severity level and explain to you why we have done so.

3. Low

This is the last severity level. This is intended to bucket all remaining issues that are happening on your staging, UAT, or development site, problems with a widget you are writing, questions on a feature, best practices, feature requests, etc. All issues relating to a non-production site will be re-assigned to low by Jive Support if initially categorized as medium or critical.

When choosing a severity level please keep in mind that there are exceptions to every rule; each company has their own priorities and criteria for defining what is 'mission critical' to their Clearspace instance and business success. We want to accurately understand the impact of each issue you submit, and we feel that moving to 3 severity levels will help us accomplish this to a higher extent.

Your feedback is welcome.

Thanks,

Jive Support

This short video goes through the basics of creating and editing tables in the RTE.

http://screencast.com/t/C0BvBBIAwkU

Note:

This video was created during development, so the table toolbar in the video has a fewer buttons than the final release. All of the tips and tricks in this video are still valid. The next table demo will go through the new buttons that were added after this demo was created.

I've heard this question a number of times here on Jivespace and I think even a couple times on our intranet (which is called Brewspace) but I've yet to see it documented anywhere, mostly because no one has ever taken the time to explain it to our awesome docs guy Steve (by the way, have you seen the new docs? They're amazing!). I doubt any of you are losing sleep about it, but just in case, here's my simplified, albeit technical, take on things. If you've got a source build handy, I'd encourage you to follow along in your favorite IDE.

PopularityDeterminationTask is the class that handles the majority of the work. It runs every 15 minutes (as configured in spring-taskContext.xml, which means you can change it via a plugin in 2.5 if you want) and works closely with ActivityManager.  Every time it runs it does the following things:

• iterates over the set of containers that exist in Clearspace (communities, projects, social groups and blogs)

• calculates the popularity of each item in the in-memory copy of activities that activity manager maintains for the current day. The score (or popularity) of each item is calculated by adding together the score of each activity on an item, the scoring is as follows:

• each comment (blogs and documents) or reply (thread) is given 5 points

• each modification (documents only) is given 5 points

• each view is given 1 point

• calculates the popularity of items in each container stored the database (a popularity score is computed for each item based on the activity that happened that day every night at midnight, this data is stored in the jivePopularity table) for the last seven days. The individual day score is adjusted for each day old that the score is recorded. We call this decay: the computation is done in SQL but if it were done in Java it would look something like this:

Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
c.add(Calendar.DATE, -daysAgo);
Date now = new Date();
Date nDaysAgo = c.getTime();
long dateDiff = now.getTime() - nDaysAgo.getTime();
long dateAdjustment = dateDiff / 86400000; 
long decayedScore = score / (1 + dateAdjustment);

• add the results of step 2 and step 3 together. So for example, let's say I published a blog post 2 months ago and through some sort of magic, it got 3 comments every day for the last 2 months (and it's already received 2 comments today that haven't been archived to the jivePopularity table). We only take into account the popularity score for the last seven days so the total score is going to be the sum of the following scores:

   

  Date	Number of Comments	Recorded Score	Score With Decay
  6/5/2008 (today)	3	15	15
  6/4/2008	3	15	7
  6/3/2008	3	15	5
  6/2/2008	3	15	3
  6/1/2008	3	15	3
  5/31/2008	3	15	2
  5/30/2008	3	15	2
  Total Score			37

   

• Finally, each item is added to a SortedSet and then copied back to ActivityManager, where it lives until the next time popularity is calculated fifteen minutes later.

So when you see a widget that shows the most popular items for a given community / space, project, social group or blog, you're getting the n items who have the highest combined score, which is a combination of comments, replies, edits and views, decayed over the last seven days. ¿Comprende?

We just released beta 4 of Clearspace 2.5.0. Changes since the last beta:

• (CS-1690) Add more field checking to the profanity filter; tags Improvements

• (CS-8007) bulletted lists and outdenting

• (CS-5369]) Remove developer upgrade tasks

• (CS-8191) Guests can read blog posts even when they are not allowed

• (CS-8109) Tasks lists are broken due to anonymous user changes

• (CS-8060) Due Date not displayed when importing/exporting project tasks with combined js resources enabled

• (CS-8040) Removed "hide profile fields from guests" setting

• (CS-8026) Recent content shows "by" the author rather than person who recently updated

• (CS-7361) Removing attachment on edit of document when document requires approval causes system error.

• (CS-6697) Documents get published in moderated spaces if the user saves a draft first and then publishes it

Many thanks for all the feedback so far and please continue to help us test the release!