Okay, you're a new customer of Jive's and you'd like to receive some support, e.g. you need to ask, "How do I add a new status level icon?"

So you go to jivesoftware.com, login, then click on the 'Support' tab.  Then you see a link to "Create a case in your secure space."  Whoa!  What is that?  How did I get a secure space?  When I click it, why does it now say "Create a new case in Company Name" ??  How cool is that?!

Creation

Well, our support solution (named the Supportal) knows about you through your email address and connects your email address to your company through our CRM system.  After making that link and ensuring you are indeed a customer, the Supportal will then create a new account space which is visible to you and those in your company. So, after verifying your information with our CRM system, we create your space and set it up with the following code:

     Log.info("Creating a community for " + accountName +" under the support community with an ID of " + support.getID());
 
      community = communityManager.createCommunity(support, accountName, accountName, "Support community for " + accountName);
 
      // set content types to threads and documents only (no blogs)
      List<ContentRetrieval.ContentType> types = new ArrayList<ContentRetrieval.ContentType>(3);
      types.add(ContentRetrieval.ContentType.THREAD);
      types.add(ContentRetrieval.ContentType.DOCUMENT);
      community.setContentTypes(types.toArray(new ContentRetrieval.ContentType[types.size()]));

Security

It is secure and private because it uses Clearspace to setup permissions to grant access only to Jive and members of your company (who are also linked in the same way you are). How can you be sure? Well, you don't see a thousand other customer spaces, do you? We do that in the following manner:

//add the new group to the new account community
((ExtendedPermissionsManager)permissionsManager).addAnonymousUserPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), PermissionType.NEGATIVE, Permissions.VIEW_COMMUNITY);
((ExtendedPermissionsManager)permissionsManager).addAnonymousUserPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), PermissionType.NEGATIVE, Permissions.READ_DOCUMENT);
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), group, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.VIEW_COMMUNITY);
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), group, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.CREATE_THREAD);
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), group, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.READ_DOCUMENT);
 
//add jive support group access
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), jiveSupportGroup, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.VIEW_COMMUNITY);
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), jiveSupportGroup, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.CREATE_THREAD);
permissionsManager.addGroupPermission(JiveConstants.COMMUNITY, community.getID(), jiveSupportGroup, PermissionType.ADDITIVE, Permissions.READ_DOCUMENT);

"So you mean to say that any cases that I create in my secure space are private to my company and members of Jive Software?"

Yup, and it's all done automatically the first time anyone from your company logs into Jivespace Community (where the Supportal lives).

We even have a Group Membership Widget that shows which accounts have access to your secure space.  It's not part of our default layout yet, so if you'd like it for your space, open a case and ask for it! (For more information on this feature, please read this blog post Jive's newest Supportal version

Stay tuned for continued information about Jive's support solution, which will happen about every two weeks!  And don't forget to subscribe to this blog! ( http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/blogs/jivespace/ )

Hello Jivespace users,

For those of you who are customers and have been using Jive's support solution (the 'Supportal'), please read on to see what changes have happened recently and how they benefit you! I will also touch on what else may have changed and how it could impact your usage (plus how to take care of it!).

If you are not a customer yet, most of this information does not apply, but it does showcase the support solution that Jive has developed and is using.

Jivespace Updated, new version of the Supportal deployed

Jivespace was updated to 2.5.5, and the Supportal plugin, which recently went a 3.5 month development cycle, was deployed last Thursday, the 18th. It was a big upgrade for the Supportal as it went under the knife and was essentially re-engineered from the ground up. It is currently developed by our very own support engineers Scott Hirdes and myself.

New Features

You will no doubt notice a few changes, but just in case you don't see them all, here is a showcase of the new features which impact the customer directly:

1. Auto Close

Cases are now going to be automatically followed up on if they are idle for more than 5 business days. This can be turned off on a per-case basis by simply choosing 'No' on the case details 'Allow this case to be auto closed' option.

2. Public Case Navigation

Have you created a public case yet? If not, please read about it here: http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/docs/DOC-2932 under the section Best Uses for "Allow Case to be Public." And if you have already created a public case, did you notice that it was difficult to get back to your account community after viewing your public case? Well not anymore! If you have created a public case, you can now navigate back to it with the link at the top of the case:

3. Moving towards Account Management

You now have a couple features which let us take the first steps into account management from the Supportal. Group Membership Widget & Support Status tab.

The Group Membership Widget can be added to your account community, and it will then show the contacts from your company who have access to your company's cases. You can ask any support engineer to add this widget to your account community!

The Support Status tab is a way for you to check if you currently have support with us. If there are any problems with this, please contact us!

Those are the new features that impact you as the customer, but there are many more changes to the plugin which benefit our support engineers, and the plugin as a whole!

Change which could affect your day to day usage

We fixed some issues with our account synchronization rules, to more appropriately reflect our underlying account information.  If you no longer see an account community that you believe you should have access to, please email accountsupport@jivesoftware.com.

If you see any other issues, please let me know as soon as you can!

Thanks and enjoy!

Supportal

This is the first in a series of upcoming blog posts where we will delve into the details behind our Supportal.  As most of our customers are already aware, the Supportal is Jive's Clearspace customization that transforms generic communities into personal communities where Jive collaborates directly with our customers via cases, documents, and projects.

This first post will provide the high-level overview, overriding design goals, business goals, and additional benefits to the Supportal.  Future posts will delve into the business decision details, and the architecture.

The Name

People often ask how the name Supportal came to be.  When it comes to overall creativity, I am horrible.  In this project's infancy, I used Customer Portal, Customer Support Portal, Support Portal, and many other terms as names.   Will French, Jive's Senior Support Engineer, and now the Supportal Development Lead, abbreviated Support Portal, to Supportal (likely making fun of me talking too fast), and the name stuck.  It also gets rid of that stigma around the word "portal" as well!

Reasons for the Supportal

The Supportal was created to resolve's Support's own business pains.  Prior to identifying the business pains however, we set 3 main overriding goals for the project:

1. Simplicity: The goal of the supportal is to solve business pain.  Too many other support sites are tough to use and hard to navigate.  Creating a case needs to be as simple and easy as possible. We continue this philosophy on upcoming features, ensuring that additional features add benefit without causing pain.
2. Accessibility: Customers weren't getting the information they needed, and people within Jive were not seeing the information they needed.  The solution needed to include as many people as possible, while still being private so that only Jive and the customer can see the information.
3. Usability: Jive prides itself on this, and this is something that's always on our list.  Making the Supportal as usable as possible is also a guiding factor we focused on during the first iteration and continue to improve upon.

With the overriding goals set, we identified the following business goals:

• Create a solution where customers can go to create all their cases, regardless of severity
  
• Replace email with an online system as the mode of communication
  
• Recreate survey information.  Associate the survey to the case.
  
• Integrate Discussions (only community) with cases to provide customers with a single location to get their answer.
  
• Provide customers the ability to create public cases, allowing others (outside Jive support) to read, contribute, and resolve, while ensuring that Jive Support will answer your issue.
  
• Provide the same functionality (email) for customers who refuse to use the new system.
  
• Remove manual customer and contract validation process
  

Solution

With the business goals identified, we realized that we had to integrate with our online community.  Clearspace provided communities (security for each customer), email notification, reply by email, discussions, and a means to replace email as the primary mode of communication.  80% of the work was done for us.  The missing parts were:

• Auto-creation of customer communities via account, customer, and contract information in Salesforce
• Validating customer ability to create cases upon user login
  
• Adding meta data into customer community discussions, allowing them to become cases.
• Customizing customer communities to show cases instead of discussions.
• Synchronizing the cases (specifically the meta data) with Salesforce.
• Paging for Severity 1 cases
• Surveys
• Creating cases via email

The following blog posts are going to delve into these sections providing more information behind each business goal, and how we customized Clearspace to solve the goal.

Additional Benefits

As with many solutions, we quickly realized that the Supportal can be used for more than just customer cases.  The first additional use case for the Supportal was identified when our professional services team started using Clearspace's project functionality within the Secure Communities.  This was exactly what Clearspace Projects were intended for, and the Supportal solved our PS department's communication requirements perfectily with no additional customizations.

We also have experienced a slight decrease in overall cases due to the increased visibility of the cases.  Managers will frequently apply a community watch so that they receive emails whenever anyone creates a case in their community.  We have had managers reply to a case telling us to disregard the case due to it being something they need to solve internally.  We have also had managers follow up with their team directly when issues are stagnating, allowing us to resolve issues quicker.

Finally, the public case feature is being used for about 7% of all of our cases.  Not a huge number, but definitely significant, and each additional case that is made public results in additional information in our community for others to see and use.  This stat is without us pushing the feature at all.

A week ago Greg wrote about the changes we recently made to simplify Jive's communities. You'll now find four communities -- Support, Features, Developers, and Plugin Downloads -- under one community to collect them all: Jivespace. I'm chiming in this week with details on changes to docs for developers building customizations to Clearspace.

Here it is in a nutshell: The latest developer documentation will be in the Developers community in Jivespace. That community is also the place to post your questions and comments. Other content, including developer content from previous versions, will be on the site where docs have been for some time now.

The best part, as I see it -- and really, I think this is fantastic -- is that it's not just docs. There's a lot more information: FAQs, how-tos, links to more information, and more. Internally, we started out calling it a "cookbook" (okay, Greg called it a cookbook and we humored him for a while). But while it wasn't really as procedural and example-driven as software cookbooks tend to be, it was obvious he was on to something. You (and we) really needed a single place to collect the knowledge we develop internally for extending and customizing Clearspace.

If you've been to the Developers overview page, you might also have noticed that we've tried to make it easier to get to what you care about. The search box and "spotlight areas" are designed to help you find developer content without leaving the developers' stuff if you don't want to.

By the way, there are no longer any Forums or older Clearspace docs on Jivespace. It had gotten to be kind of a mess (a "train wreck," as one of its admirers said). We're thinking it's better to have one version of developer content on the Developers community, and the rest of it where other docs live. See what you think.

Here are the links of interest:

• Developers -- current Clearspace developer content
  
• Latest archived Clearspace doc content (for earlier versions, replace "latest" in the URL with a version number -- such as "2.5.2")
• Links to documentation for all Jive products
  

A bug was uncovered in our Rich Text Editor after the 2.5.3 release that we deemed important enough to fix before our next release of 2.5.4.  The bug affected tables and bulleted list item.

Please find the updated builds available for download on your purchases page

If you have any questions, please add them as comments to this blog post.

Regards,

Megan

You can download the latest version from your purchases page.

Clearspace 5.5.21 Changelog

• Full Documentation

There's been some confusion (and not enough communication from us) about platform support for Clearspace 2.5, so I wanted to post details about how it all works. In order to focus QA efforts we're phasing in support for additional application servers and databases throughout the 2.5.x release cycle. The most critical thing to know is that you shouldn't attempt to upgrade to 2.5.x until your environment is supported. Or even better, consider migrating to our recommended platform configuration (see below).

The table below represents our current roadmap for platform support (the release column indicates where a particular platform is first supported). As with any roadmap, it's subject to changes based on shifting demands or unexpected issues:

The breakdown of recommended and supported platforms for the 2.5.x release cycle:

Finally, some information about language support roadmap in the 2.5.x series:

Today's tip: moving rows and columns in the RTE:

http://screencast.com/t/M0p6uSxG0