VMware Communities Blog

Recently-added Public Betas

Badsah — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

It's been a while since I updated all of you on the creation of new VMware Communities. Since we created the first two beta portals, Workstation 6.5 Beta and ACE 2.5 Beta, two more public beta program communities have emerged: VMware ThinApp™ and VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta . Obviously, the VMware desktop product teams have been quite active! But don't worry, the server product teams are quietly working behind the scenes, and you'll see the fruit of their labor in due time.

Meanwhile, the Workstation 6.5 Beta and ACE 2.5 Beta portals have been refreshed, but will now require you to register, in order to view the beta portal as well as to download the binaries. The initial step is annoying: having to go in and complete that dreaded registration form all over again, and accepting the End User License Agreement. However, the upside is that, in the future, you will never have to register again for beta programs for these two products. (Some users have been complaining about going through registration process and receiving an error message: "Unauthorized." I am writing a separate post just on that subject.)

Thanks.

Badsah

November 21 Update

Badsah — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:49:00 GMT

Last update before we Americans go stuff ourselves over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend: performance and stability appear to be fine for the fifth straight day. Given this, and a combination of VMware's scheduled maintenance windows plus holiday vacation schedules for critical team members, we have decided to postpone the deployment of a second node to our cluster until first week of December.

Thank you, and will be back online on Monday, November 26!

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

November 20 Update: Note U.S. Holiday, Nov. 22-23 (Thanksgiving)

Badsah — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:31:00 GMT

NOTICE: Due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, the VMware's U.S. offices will be closed Thursday and Friday, November 22 and 23, 2007.

Well, we are cautiously optimistic that we've reached a period of stability on the site. We have enjoyed four plus days of continuous uptime, and the performance has been consistently reasonable. We are still targeting end of next week (last week of November) for adding the second server to the cluster, to enhance the performance.

If you still encounter sporadic error messages, reload/refresh the page and you will usually see the error disappear. If the problem persists, please bring it to our attention. Details such as timing, page information, and specifics of what you were doing at the time are helpful, as always.

Thank you.

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

Features in the pipeline

JohnTroyer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:55:00 GMT

We're continuing to do performance tuning and monitoring on the system. In parallel, we are continuing our software development, both in-house here at VMware as well as at Jive. We've got several features and UI changes in the pipeline.

In the shorter term, we are reintroducing several useful features that we used to have in the old VMTN based on Jive Forums that were not present in the Jive Clearspace platform we're now using. These features are in testing and we hope to have them out to you next week. (I hope early next week.)

Threaded display mode for discussions. This will add a preference to display discussions as a tree of indented replies. People have strong feelings about this, one way or another. For most forums, I actually prefer a flat display, and as an admin, I think flat displays help keep a thread on topic. However, for the intense discussions and the demographic we have here, and because we are all used to it, I think a threaded display is absolutely necessary. It's actually very useful as an moderator as well if we have to delete a message or branch a thread.

View all posts from a user. This will show all the messages posted by a user in a tab on their profile. Right now, in your profile you can only see the threads you've started, not the ones you've replied to. This is useful to keep track of your current conversations, and it's also useful to get more context about others in the community and what all they're participating in.

Set posts per page. This is a real convenience function to be able to set 50 instead of 15 posts/page. Right now, the default is 15 and you have to keep resetting it. This will be a preference, as it was in Forums.

Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the community you're in, as it did in Forum. Once you're doing a search, you can specify other communities. Tip: you can select multiple communities -- for Windows, use shift-click or control-click.

Legibility tweaks. We will be tweaking the UI for fonts and colors to make it more readable.

Outstanding high-priority issues that will be addressed, but not by early next week:

Rich Text Editor. It doesn't load all the time, and is frustrating when it loads. This is the highest priority item for which I don't have a scheduled fix date. Tip: try out the Plain Text editor -- it's faster, and it has automatic spell-check.

Search. Results are per-message, not per-thread; there is no user filter (although you will be able to see all posts by a user now); some syntax isn't working; search results can be poor in general. Tip: use Boolean syntax (foo AND bar, foo || bar), not Google-style syntax. Also, you can use Google and add the term "(site:communities.vmware.com OR site:www.vmware.com/community)" -- works pretty well. Google still has a mix of old and new pages in its index.

Front page. We want to simplify the front page and add indications there when there are unread messages within a community.

Right sidebar. The right sidebar was designed as a way of adding contextual resources to each community -- links to docs, latest builds, kb articles, white papers, security alerts, blog postings from the team. For performance reasons, every community shows the same sidebar, and it takes up too much room on the page. We will address this.

Favorites/Watches. Have some graphical way in the communities of indicating which threads you're interested in, instead of having to go to your profile.

A fuller list of outstanding issues is VMware Communities Known Issues. I think soon we'll be faster and more powerful than where we were, so we can get back to the business of virtualization. (Oh, and there are some very interesting new community topics and blogs in the pipeline, but that's for another day.)

Monitoring and IE Performance

RDellimmagine — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:43:00 GMT

Monitoring Issues

On Sunday night into Monday morning, we had unexpected downtime on VMware Communities. As soon as we realized, we immediately rebooted VMware Communities and performance returned to reasonable levels, but that was after many community members in time zones other than Pacific experienced several hours of poor performance. We had been checking the site manually all weekend, but from Sunday night to Monday morning Pacific, the site was unusably slow. We are sorry for that, especially since we are aware how many of you rely on VMware Communities professionally and personally. We’ve now shortened the acceptable response time for our monitoring system to 20 seconds – if a page loads slower than 20 seconds, we get an alert and will examine system statistics and respond appropriately.

New Build Environment

On Thursday, we recreated our build environment by rolling in a series of performance patches we had made since going live. Recreating our build environment is a necessary step before we can roll out the additional usability and performance fixes that we have been (and continue to be) working on. The build appears to have caused some issues with the order of posts on the various community pages (although the timestamps are still correct). Jive Software is working on identifying a fix, and I will give an update here tomorrow.

Today's Fixes

The advantage of having a new build environment is that we are able today to roll out a set of usability and performance fixes:

Internet Explorer Performance: We replaced the JavaScript-based top menus with CSS-based ones, which makes them faster on Internet Explorer, both IE6 and IE7. Since people’s experiences have varied depending on their hardware, software, and location, please let us know if these menus now work for you.

Private Message notifications: The “My Content” in your menu bar now turns orange when you have a private message waiting for you.

Blog formatting: Some blog pages didn’t format correctly, and these are now fixed.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to work on performance, including the issues that caused the outage Sunday night / Monday morning. This week we are also working on the top features that were lost in the move from VMTN Forums to VMware Communities, as well as some other usability improvements. I expect some good news on those two areas as well as performance over the course of the week.

I promise to keep you all informed more frequently of progress.

One step at a time -- site update

JohnTroyer — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:47:00 GMT

You may notice some small changes in the Communities today.

Discussion tabs are now selected by default. From there, you can more easily see unread posts (bold) and link directly to the last reply (last column)
Status icons are back in threads

We are targeting another update by early next week.

We continue to experience slow performance at certain times. We're working closely with Jive to identify the root cause and resolve these issues. We have monitoring in place that will automatically restart the application when it becomes unresponsive. IE performance, both with IE6 and IE7, remains problematic. Along with overall slow behavior, the editor seems to load with difficulty. Once it loads, try clicking on the Plain Text tab and then clicking on 'Always use this editor'. The Plain Text editor may load more reliably.

Today's update. During the launch, we patched the application several times. We needed ensure our source control system was in sync with these changes and to do regression testing so that future updates would not break anything. This why you haven't seen a lot of changes this week. Today we switched to this new version of the code -- and we also slipped in those two features.

UI update. While we were waiting, we've already queued up a number of fixes, including faster CSS-based menus to replace the slow Javascript menus and many other UI changes. One of the major goals is to make IE more usable with this update. We'll be testing that build Friday but may wait until after the weekend to release.

Feature update. We also have developers working on the most important missing features from this list: VMware Communities Known Issues. We'll have a better estimate tomorrow, but I am hoping the first batch them will also appear next week.

Ongoing work. We expect to continue the bug fixes and improvements for several more weeks. After that we hope changes will happen less frequently, and we can start to experiment and learn what we can do with our new collaboration tools. See What's It All About? for more information on why we upgraded the Communities.