VMware Communities Blog

The performance upgrade that increases caching of the communities application is now live. See details at Performance Upgrade Planned May 28.

Please reply to Performance Upgrade Is Live and let us know if you're seeing any improvements.

Team Fusion has been making good use of the Documents feature in VMware Communities. Since the release of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta, the product team has been collecting feedback from the beta community on the compatibility and performance of DirectX 3D gaming applications with VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta. They are leveraging open, online collaboration amongst beta participants on the Document: VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta: 3D Games Testing Matrix.

The most obvious benefit is that any beta participant can contribute to the matrix, thus helping to build up a useful repository of information valuable to the community of VMware Fusion users who wish to use 3D games within a virtual machine. But a by-product of this process is that this medium of online collaboration is bringing together individuals who share a very specific common interest - and that is, after all, the point of web communities, isn't it?

Do you have other good examples of Documents and online collaboration in VMware Communities? Would love to read about them in your comments on this blog post.

• Badsah

The short session timeout has been fixed. Sessions now last for 30 days, just like they did before. Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the short timeout in the last few days.

The May 9 - 11 infrastructure upgrade completed successfully. There is one outstanding issue and one usability improvement.

Outstanding Issue: Prior to the upgrade, login was required only once every 30 days as long as you didn't delete your VMware cookies. Following the upgrade, session timeout is 60 minutes, meaning you need to log in again after 60 minutes. We are working to restore the original functionality, but in the meantime it will be necessary to log in more frequently.

Usability Improvement: On your profile screen, e.g. http://communities.vmware.com/people/<your_username>, you can now update your VMware Store profile as well as your VMware Communities profile. Prior to the upgrade, you could only update your VMware Communities profile.

If you click "Edit Communities Profile" in the Actions box, you can edit the fields that show up in your VMware Communities profile, including your name, the email where watches are sent, and your signature.

If you click "Edit VMware profile / Change password" in the Actions box, you can edit your VMware Store profile. This is new, and should make it easier to maintain your VMware Store profile. Also new: you may now change the email address in your VMware Store profile.



One thing to note: The email address in your Communities profile and the email address in your VMware Store profiles can be changed independently of each other:

• + The email address in your Communities profile is where emails generated by VMware Communities watches (e.g. when you click "Receive email notifications" on a thread) are sent.
• + The email address in your VMware Store profile is your VMware Store login name. If you update this email address, you will need to use the updated email address the next time you log in.

You may have noticed the announcement posted May 1 (or if you didn't, I'd like you to see it) that system maintenance will occur from May 9 - 12. During that maintenance window, VMware Communities will be available read-only, and you will be unable to login to your account or access any functions like posting content or replies that require login. You will also be unable to access or manage your VMware account; submit support requests online; download, purchase or register VMware products; or manage VMware product licenses.

The reason for the outage is to upgrade some functions of VMware Store to a more robust platform. We are not making any changes to VMware Communities directly, except for the login / logout / manage profile function that previously relied on VMware Store and now will use the new infrastructure. From the standpoint of a VMware Communities participant, the change should be mostly transparent -- you may notice some cosmetic changes when you log in, but the process will be the same.

Once this maintenance is complete, we will start in the next few weeks to make improvements to the VMware Communities user experience. We have been working with Akamai on a new configuration that will allow full caching of guest content. This will improve performance for guests (site visitors who are not logged in) because all guest pages (except for cache misses, of course) will be served by Akamai without having to go back to our servers. And it will improve logged in performance by offloading most guest traffic from our origin servers and by increasing the cacheability of logged-in pages. We expect to complete testing of this configuration in the next few weeks, so I will blog again when this is ready to roll out.

Following the performance improvements, we will next roll out the 2-column design that simplifies the layout of VMware Communities and improves readability of pages. This design contains a number of usability improvements requested by communities participants. See Homepage Design Proposal for details.

I'm looking forward to fixing some long-standing issues and improving everyone's experience on VMware Communities. Please feel free to comment or send me a private message if you have any questions.

Regards, Robert