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Re: Coming Soon: NI Community Renovations!

LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

We are very excited to announce upcoming renovations to the NI Community! This project represents a major improvement that will greatly benefit all of the NI Community members!

 

What is happening?
We are working to create a single, unified NI Community experience that is easier for our members to understand, use, and gain value from. To do so, we will be migrating the content and experiences (documents, user groups, and blogs) from the NI User Group Community onto the platform currently used to host the NI Discussion Forums.

Why are we making this change?
We have consistently heard from our members that hosting the NI Community experience through two systems has made the experience confusing and difficult to use. We can improve every facet of our members’ experience of the NI Community by setting up a more unified, usable system. You will no longer have to go between two sites to interact with your peers, and this will enable the NI Community Team to be more responsive in building out more improvements to the experience.

Other benefits of this effort:

  • Easier navigation with everything in one place
  • One profile for all of your content, stats, ranks, and messages
  • Responsive design providing one consistent experience across all desktop, mobile, and tablet devices
  • Up-to-date platform and support from our community vendor, Lithium
  • Better spam protection with Lithium's spam filtering and moderation systems

What is the impact of this change?
This change will most significantly impact blogs, user groups, and community documents. We will be creating a central NI Community experience, which includes these use cases and the current implementation of the NI Discussion Forums and NI Idea Exchange. The experiences currently hosted on the NI Discussion Forums will be impacted out of necessity, but we will work to minimize this impact wherever possible.

When will this change occur?
See the latest timeline here.

What will happen to my existing content on the Community site?
The majority of existing content will be migrated. As part of the effort, there may be an audit of content that will be migrated. If any content is not included in the migration, users will be notified in advance.

I don’t really use the NI Community currently. Is this going to negatively impact the Discussion Forums?
No. Cat Happy While there may need to be some organizational changes, we will make every effort to reduce the impact on the NI Discussion Forums experience. We view the Discussion Forums and your contributions to them as extremely valuable and this project will only be successful if that experience is preserved!

 

Do I have to do anything?

The NI Community team will be managing all of the heavy lifting -- but your input is always welcome!

 

We're extremely interested in any thoughts or questions that you have and would love to hear from you in the comments below.

~~~~~~~~~
Comments
preston_johnson
Active Participant

I manage a couple of community pages.  In these, I have posted pdf documents, and facilitated some discussions. 

 

Further, I enjoy the NIWeek proceedings that are in the NI Community Groups.  My favorite sessions have been tagged with the tag "mcm". 

 

Please help smooth the transition by insuring the documents, discussions, group overview, and especially the tags carry over to the new system. 

 

Thank you very much. 

 

Preston Johnson

Principal, Allied Reliability Group

johnsonp@alliedreliability.com

+1-512 431 2371

Preston Johnson
Solutions Manager, Industrial IoT: Condition Monitoring and Predictive Analytics
cbt
512 431 2371
preston.johnson@cbtechinc
mikeporter
Proven Zealot

How are these big changes different from the "big changes" that were announced 2 (or was it 3? 4?) years ago?

 

Mike...


Certified Professional Instructor
Certified LabVIEW Architect
LabVIEW Champion

"... after all, He's not a tame lion..."

For help with grief and grieving.
LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

Preston - the majority of groups, documents, tags, etc. will be migrated over. More information on this will be coming soon.

 

Mike - Are the past changes you're referring to regarding having the "Discussion Forums" site and "User Group Community" site interact with each other better? If so, then yes this is much different.

The big takeaway here is that there will be no longer be a separate "Discussion Forums" site and a separate "User Group Community" site. Instead, there will be just one site (and one platform) as the home of all of these experiences -- the NI Community.

~~~~~~~~~
mikeporter
Proven Zealot

The notices I refer to were for the User Group Community. It was a while ago, but as I recall the promises were the same, they just didn't go anywhere.

Mike...


Certified Professional Instructor
Certified LabVIEW Architect
LabVIEW Champion

"... after all, He's not a tame lion..."

For help with grief and grieving.
LiliMcDonald
NI Employee (retired)

The changes described here above are most definitely 100% happening this time! Cat Happy

~~~~~~~~~
RobertoBozzolo
Proven Zealot

This is good news in my opinion! Having the Community and the forums as separate entities indeed ingenerates confusion. Additionally if all resources are grouped into one single interface users may find them more easily.

If I may add, this should be paired with some improvement in searching engine: the more items are grouped together, the more powerful and flexible must be the search engine. Just as an example, at present is almost impossible to filter user contributed code by programming language (you know, there are not only LabVIEW users here Smiley Wink )



Proud to use LW/CVI from 3.1 on.

My contributions to the Developer Community
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Matt_McLaughlin
NI Employee (retired)

Hi Roberto,

 

That's a great point and it's actually something we're actively considering!

 

We're working to set up a structure that would allow users looking through our exampe code catalog to narrow their search according to factors such as software environment, hardware used, software add-ons, etc. Out of curiousity, languages are you using? What would you like to see under that list?

 

Thank you for your input!

Matt
NI Community Team
National Instruments
RobertoBozzolo
Proven Zealot

I'm a big LabWindows/CVI fan! Smiley Happy



Proud to use LW/CVI from 3.1 on.

My contributions to the Developer Community
________________________________________
If I have helped you, why not giving me a kudos?
Matt_McLaughlin
NI Employee (retired)

That will certainly be an option, once we have that functionality up and running Smiley Happy

Matt
NI Community Team
National Instruments