I whole-heartedly concur with Michael's assessment of both the positives and (unfortunately overwhelming) negative bullet points, and wish to add:
Negative:
- The whole "Ideation" is broken. Direct links to "Ideas" lead to empty pages, the idea search and pagination hangs (IE11 and current Opera, i.e. Chrome engine), and seemingly server-side:
This is a major one for me, since ideation has been billed as the way to make your voice heard for improving the product and plainly, Automic and CA had in many cases taken to direct what I consider bug reports into the ideation system as "ideas" instead. So I sincerely hope this can get fixed soon, old direct links included.
Apart from this, I admire Michael's dedication to compiling that constructive list.
I, on the other hand, have to conclude that within very short time, we've gone through another migration that places the burden to report the many things that are broken or missing on the user of the communities. Make no mistake, when I go through my old posts and the new community and ticket pages, I find more things broken or missing than just the ideation. But I can neither stomach, nor justify to my employer (on whose time I participated heavily in the old communities) to collate lists and examples once again.
I understand the desire to integrate everything into the portals of the current owner, but there's only so many times one can reasonably ask volunteers for understanding. At this time at least, it appears that the new software, as far as visible to us, seemingly is different enough to lack entire feature sets, and thus, at least for the time being, parts of content created by volunteers have seemingly been eliminated from view, such as people's profile customization and Michael's blog.
I am also somewhat lacking understanding for the fact that, after the scalding comments Automic received at FOKUS Germany on a previous breakdown of communication, while the announcements were plenty and timely this time, as far as I am aware, those only mentioned the
communities. We here, at least, were in no way aware that the ticket system would be migrated, too. The first mail I see with an indication to that fact arrived Sunday late at night directly ahead of the migration. We've been burned at the time by the ticket migration from the Automic to the CA system, thus I'd really have appreciated an advanced warning that the support ticket system was moving into something else, too.
So I'm deeply sorry for so bluntly having to say this, but this contributor's understanding has now run out.
Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2019 04:41 AM
From: Michael Lowry
Subject: Migration from CA to Broadcom community site
Over the weekend, the migration of CA Communities content to the Broadcom community site was completed. The new site is quite different from the old one, and it will take some time to get accustomed to the changes. Below are a few preliminary observations.
Positive
- Signing up for a Broadcom.com account was relatively painless, and old user-created content was correctly associated with users.
- Most content was migrated and at least superficially looks pretty good.
- The Higher Logic rich text editor offers some controls that were lacking in Jive, including indent, outdent, subscript & superscript
Negative
- All links to forums and specific articles on the old site are now broken. Deep links do not forward to migrated content, but only to the main community page. (In our internal wiki, we have hundreds of links to content in the old CA community site. All of these links are now broken.)
- Many links to other community content that appear in community articles are broken. Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Links to external content are broken. I.e., ones that begin with
E.g., all the documentation links in the article Documentation for AE, Messages, DB schema, Java APIs, etc.
- List of contributions by user does not work (or was lost during migration).
- User avatars & photos were not migrated.
- User blogs were not migrated.
- User status updates were not migrated.
- Group memberships were not migrated.
- Forum subscriptions were not preserved.
- Events were not migrated.
- User reputation and achievements were lost, or if we're generous, 'migrated' to a tiny set of HL equivalents.
- Tags/labels on replies were completely lost.
- Images were not always migrated successfully. Examples: 1, 2
- Documents were converted to library articles, but it is not possible to create new documents. Previous version & edit history were completely lost.
- Existing questions in Jive were migrated, but it is not possible to post new questions. It is not possible to filter for just questions.
- HTML TITLE tags of specific articles contain only the forum name, not the subject of the article.
- Article URLs are often not clean URLs. That is, they contain no human-readable description of the content, but only a computer-generated document ID.
- No HTML TABLE editing functions in the rich text editor.
- Block quotes now all have stylized double quotation marks; there is no way to disable these.
- Code blocks were not migrated correctly, and existing language-specific syntax highlighting was often lost.
- AE scripting syntax highlighting is missing.
- The rich text editor for comments is rudimentary. There is no way to switch to the full editor or switch to a full page instead of a narrow, unresizeable modal dialog box.
- Lots of wasted space and unnecessarily large headings abound. It's a lot harder than before to display a list of relevant content and see more than a few entries on the page at once.
- The search box is displayed only after clicking the magnifying glass icon, a relatively small click target. Extra steps like this are unnecessary and reduce usability.
- Search filters are far less capable than in Jive.
- Search results are sorted in an illogical way, with replies often appearing before articles.
- When clicking the Back button after visiting a search result, one is taken to a blank search page. The original search results are lost.
- Posts are now moderated.
- It's no longer possible to edit the subject of a post.
- There is no mobile app.
In general, the Higher Logic community platform appears far less capable than the Jive platform it replaces. Perhaps the platform is simply not being shown in the best light here. But whether due to core functionality or the specific implementation at Broadcom, the site does not look particularly good when compared to the Jive community site at CA. Both in terms of basic capabilities and design, it falls short. Also, the social features and gamification in HL are a lot less fun than in Jive. Because the platform has fewer capabilities, is harder to use, looks worse, and is less fun, I would not be surprised if user engagement dropped precipitously. This would be a shame.
Some weeks ago, there were enthusiastic announcements of a forthcoming opportunity for users to test the new site prior to its official launch. This obviously never happened. If Broadcom had followed through on this plan, it could have identified some of the above problems prior to the go-live.
#automiccommunity #ca_community_migration #jive #higher_logic