An independent study conducted by non-official Insight's contractors revealed

that most half-shirt owners are "green & yellow" by nature.

We are the middle children that lacked the hugs and attention during our formative

years.  Half-shirts help relieve some of this lost love.

Currently, an Insight User Profile plugin is being developed and will be

released in the 3rd quarter.

Out with the old

In the past, when a customer wanted to check on the status of any of their open cases they would log into their secure space overview page and use the Community Open Cases widget. This widget was designed with a very simple goal in mind, just display the open cases with a bit of extra information and an emphasis on Severity 1 issues. This proved useful for quite some time and gave customers a good overview of what was going on with their community from a support perspective.

However, there was one major flaw. Customers had no way of interacting with this information and often found it very difficult to organize this data in a manner that they could use quickly and efficiently. Welcome, open cases widget 2.0!

The new and improved open cases widget

Along with our upgrade of the Supportal to SBS 3.0, I took on the job of updating this widget to provide customers with better control over their open cases. There are two major upgrades that I gave this widget which have enhanced the way people use it:

1. Cases broken down by Severity

Instead of displaying all the open cases in a potentially enormous group, I've broken down the display into 3 distinctive parts. This is especially helpful for customers with more than 10+ open support cases at a time and allows customers to quickly see if they have any Level 1 issues that they need to attend to quickly.

2. New case option available: Priority

To the right of every case status is a set of up and down buttons which control the individual priority of every issue (within their respective severity).

Okay great, so how do I use it?

Step 1: Log in

Log into the Supportal and visit your Company's secure space "Overview" tab

Step 2: Organize open cases

Browse through any open cases and use the "move up/move down" buttons to re-order them. All the moving on the screen will be done in real-time thanks to our good old friend Javascript. You may recognize these buttons from SBS, as they are used to control the location of profile fields on the admin console registration settings page.

Step 3: Don't forget to Save!

As of right now, your cases will be in the order you want on the overview page, but there is one final step. You will need to click the Save Settings button at the bottom right hand corner of the widget. This will take the current ordering of your widget and persist the case priorities to the database.

You will receive a friendly notification at the top of the widget that your Priority changes have been successfully saved, and you are done!

Well that's easy enough, how does it all work?

I'm glad you asked--it's really quite simple.

Displaying the widget

First off, the widget loads up all the non-closed cases within a secure space and puts them into three different Collections (one for each severity):

for (String caseID : caseIDs) {
    try {
        SupportCase supportCase = supportCaseManager.getSupportCase(Long.parseLong(caseID));
        String status = supportCase.getStatus();
        if (status != null && !caseStatusManager.isClosedStatus(status)) {
            String severity = supportCase.getSeverity();
            String priority = supportCase.getPriority();
            supportCase.setPriority(priority != null ? priority : "0");
 
            if(severity.equals("Level 1")) {
                openSev1Cases.add(supportCase);
                Collections.sort(openSev1Cases, new CaseComparator());
            }
            else if(severity.equals("Level 2")) {
                openSev2Cases.add(supportCase);
                Collections.sort(openSev2Cases, new CaseComparator());
            }
            else {
                openSev3Cases.add(supportCase);
                Collections.sort(openSev3Cases, new CaseComparator());
            }
        }
    }
    catch (NotFoundException e) {
        log.error("Could not retreive support case in OpenCasesWidget: " + e.getMessage());
    }
}

(Ideally this will get refactored soon to allow for more or less than 3 severities instead of being hard-coded. But it will work for now.)

The CaseComparator() orders all the currently open cases by their priority in the database. If nothing has yet been set, it will be put in the order that the cases were created.

The fancy effects

The cases are now sent to the template, where they are displayed in their respective severity grouping and automatically hooked into the Javascript functions that allow the up/down buttons to work. When you click on one of the buttons the following Javascript magic happens:

1. References to the required objects on the screen are loaded up using Javascript:

var moveUp = function(e, type) {
    Event.stop(e);
    var ansc = this.up(".case-field");
    if(ansc != undefined) {
        ansc.previous().insert({before: ansc});
        updateHiddenField(ansc, ansc.next());
    }
    updateOrderingAnchors(type);
}

2. A hidden priority field for each case is updated with the new ordering value:

var updateHiddenField = function(element, newElement) {
    var temp = element.select(".case-priority")[0].value;
    element.select(".case-priority")[0].value = newElement.select(".case-priority")[0].value;
    newElement.select(".case-priority")[0].value = temp;
}

3. The ordering of the case above (or below if the down arrow was pressed) will be swapped on screen and the list rebuilt:

var updateOrderingAnchors = function(type) {
    if(type == "1") {
        var elms = $("sev1-case-list-body").select("tr");
    }else if(type == "2") {
        var elms = $("sev2-case-list-body").select("tr");
    }else{
        var elms = $("sev3-case-list-body").select("tr");
    }
    elms.each(function(tr, i) {
        var anchors = tr.select(".field-moveup")[0];
        if (i <= 0) {
            anchors.update("<span class='move-up-disabled'>move up</span>");
        }
        else {
            anchors.update(new Element("a", {"class": "anchor-move-up", href: "#"}).update("move up"));
        }
        anchors = tr.select(".field-movedown")[0];
        if (i == elms.length - 1) {
            anchors.update("<span class='move-down-disabled'>move down</span>");
        }
        else {
            anchors.update(new Element("a", {"class": "anchor-move-down", href: "#"}).update("move down"));
        }
    });
    bindAnchors();
}

4. Now that the ordering is complete, you click the Save Settings button which makes a call to this Javascript to call a DWR method and display the nice notification at the top of the widget:

CasePriorityAction.setPriorities( values, {
    callback:function() {
        $('save-button').enable();
        $('jive-success-box').style.display = "block";
        Effect.Fade($('jive-success-box'),{delay: 3, duration: 5});
    }
});

Saving the data

The final step involves saving this to the database, which is done by the call to the setPriorities DWR method as noted above. This loops through all the cases on the screen and sets the priorities in the database accordingly:

public void setPriorities(List<String> values) {
    try {
        for(String value : values){
            String[] vars = value.split("-");
            SupportCase supportCase = supportCaseManager.getSupportCase(Long.parseLong(vars[1]));
            supportCase.setPriority(vars[2]);
            
            supportCaseManager.updateSupportCase(supportCase);
        }
    }
    catch (NotFoundException e) {
        log.error("Could not retreive case in CasePriorityAction: " + e.getMessage());
    }
}

I hope this information provides you with interesting insight into how our custom development allows us to work smarter and more efficiently with all our customers.  We want these new features to enrich your Jive experience!

As always, Jive welcomes any and all feedback about this feature and the Supportal in general.  Please comment on this post or start a discussion in our Supportal Feedback space.

An interesting aspect to the system is the concept of Friend Management.  In our organization, this is sleeper functionality.  When you befriend someone, you can use labels to organize your friendships into meaningful groupings. In the UI, go to Your Stuff > Friends and on the right hand side you'll see the Add/edit Labels.

You might be asking: What can this do for me?

By grouping your friends/connections into these buckets, you get an RSS Aggregation feed that notifies you when anyone in that grouping performs an action.

This is a very powerful way to follow people in the organization, whether you are in the SBS Dashboard, RSS Feed Reader, or external system with RSS Consumption Services.

Users can have multiple labels, so you can bleed a person across the different areas as you deem necessary by simply applying multiple labels to your friends.  Another important element is that this association is controlled by the user, not by the system.

It's pretty easy and very powerful, so give it a whirl and let me know what you think!  Any one have any other sleeper features they'd like to share?  Shout 'em out! =)

When I first interviewed Ben a few months ago, it only took a few minutes before I was trying to sign him up. Finding a good marketing exec is one of the toughest challenges out there -- very few people have the gift to bring big ideas together with an execution mindset, the ability to build a category while working closely with the field, partners and customers; and most importantly, a talent for making the people around them better. In short, Ben is a hugely talented leader who brings the energy and focus needed to put more distance between us and the competition in the Social Business Software (SBS) category.

Ben will be responsible for Jive's global marketing strategy, in addition to spearheading strategic partnerships and corporate development activities. He is joining us at a pivotal time in our evolution where, despite the brutal economy, we continue to post record-breaking quarters and demonstrate market momentum. Ben's track record in scaling companies for growth and success, and capitalizing on unique opportunities, is going to be pivotal in our strategy.

Before joining Jive, Ben was the Chief Marketing Officer for Interwoven, one of the fastest growing companies in the web content optimization market, through their recent acquisition by Autonomy. He has also held executive management positions for technology leaders including Siebel Systems, Onyx Software, and Clarify (where he worked alongside fellow executive Tony Zingale, now a Jive Board member). In addition, Ben has led product marketing, corporate marketing, field marketing, and partner teams for both emerging companies as well as billion-dollar organizations, and has been very closely involved with the industry analysts. You can learn more about his credentials on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-kiker/0/167/7a4).

You'll be hearing more from Ben soon (he'll have a blog shortly) as we get him ramped up!

Today we launched Jive Express, a cloud service that lets enterprise business users get up and running with social business software within minutes. The cost is $3 a user/month and we're making the first three months or 100 users free for qualified companies. Departments and cross-company teams have never had such easy access to a collaborative social software product this powerful. It's the same incredibly rich platform that underlies our Jive SBS product along with features specifically targeted for teams like the success dashboard pictured at right. (Want to know how Jive Express stacks up to our full-blown Jive SBS platform? See the quick matrix). Other than being jazzed about the product and the fact that I got to be on the team at Jive that built it, I'm also excited about our first foray into cloud computing and the strategy we're building around it.

How is Jive approaching the cloud? We believe large organizations will embrace the cloud but that it will be a multi-year process. We want to be there to help with the transition in a pragmatic, realistic way. In the short-term, that means making it easy to transistion on and off the cloud using our single tenant architecture (see my last blog for more on single tenant cloud apps). We've used virtualization to drive amazing levels of cost efficiency while providing maximum security and data isolation. We know that enterprise companies are still in the intial stages of cloud adoption, so we're making it very easy to start there but then move to on-premise or to our more traditional hosted environment as the implementation scales. This hybrid approach is unique and we believe it's the best approach for enterprise cloud adoption. To implement all of this, we chose Amazon's AWS service as the backend cloud provider. Working with them has been a fantastic experience so far and they seem to be well on their way to solving many of the enterprise cloud concerns around security and compliance.

I plan to blog a lot more details about how we built the Jive Express service as well as our ongoing cloud ventures in the future. Also check out my interview with whurley at Infoworld for more details. In the meantime, be sure to check out the Jive Express site and signup.