Why are we doing this upgrade anyway?

It's a good question, and a relevant one. The answer in short: The new features make it easier to share and find more information.

Here's how:

• Discussions: Discussions are still question-and-answer format, and a key source of technical and support information. If you've put a watch on a thread, you can now reply to the thread directly in the email generated by the watch -- you don't need to go back to the site to reply. And we will soon put into practice a flag that allows virtuoso-level community members and above flag content that requires a VMware response -- and we are training our product and development managers to look at those flagged posts first to ensure the critical questions requiring VMware company expertise get answered quickly.

• Documents: Documents are for sharing information or techniques that you have figured out, tested, and put into practice. For example, best practice explanations, sample code and scripts, process descriptions, or the spreadsheet format you use to track metrics. It's much easier to create them as documents rather than adding them as attachments to threads.

• Blogs: Every community member has a personal blog. Blogs are a great way to tell a story over time -- like an implementation diary describing a problem you encountered and the steps you took to overcome it. Let's say you need double computing capacity in six months on a fixed budget. Start by describing the goal you were given (or that you worked out for yourself), do another post a week later as you start to think out your plan, and so on. Another example is this blog, where the VMware Communities team is describing our plans and the issues we face as they unfold. We all want to read about issues our peers are facing, and a blog is a perfect way to describe complex problems and solutions as they unfold -- a blog is much more authentic than a summary written after the fact.

• Converting Threads to Documents: This solves the new visitor problem. A new visitor wants to get a sense of what is up with Workstation or VirtualCenter, and his only option was to read a lot of discussion threads. Now, the community can identify interesting threads, convert them to documents, and edit it down to the essential information of the post. For each community, we will create FAQ documents that are links to these converted threads, and serve as a great starting point for any community. New visitors can get the overview from each community's FAQ.

• Tagging: Tagging makes it easier to find information. Community members tag new blogs, documents, and discussions with keywords that lets the community define the categories where content is placed. And because you can add multiple tags, a discussion, document or blog post can appear in multiple categories, not just the traditional product categories of the old forums. The system recommends popular tags so it's easy to find existing relevant tags.

• Better Naming and URLs: Most everything in VMware Communities has easy-to-remember names and URLs. After http://communities.vmware.com, all communities start with "/community", threads start with "/thread", documents with "/doc", blogs with "/blog", people with "/people", and tags with "/tag". And all resources in the community are easy to link to via wiki markup syntax.

• RSS: Just about everything in VMware Communities is RSS-enabled, so you can subscribe to whole communities or various parts of them via RSS.

And last but not least: none of the above was possible with the old VMTN Forums. The new platform not only has many more features, but it is also more flexible and allows us to add new features and modify existing ones.

Back to the Short Answer

All of these features help make it easier for VMware Communities to grow in breadth and depth of information, and they make it easier to find more relevant information. Yes, it is still obvious that we need to continue ironing out usability issues so that community members can take advantage of the improvements. But as we do, and as the power of the new features becomes clear to more community members, the value of VMware Communities will grow.