VMware

Welcome to the VMware Communities Tour!

Use this tour to get a step-by-step view of some of the things you can do with VMware Communities.

If you are familiar with VMware Technology Network (VMTN), you will see all of the functions you have come to know, plus a number of new functions like personal blogs for all community members, collaborative wiki documents, wysiwyg editing of discussions and wiki documents, tagging of all content, improved search, and replying to threads via email. These features are meant to increase the benefits you get from participating in the community.

The organization of VMware Communities is the same as VMTN, although we’ve pulled out the developer topics, user groups, and betas into separate communities to make them easier to find. All of your watches and private messages remain unchanged, and any threads, messages, or forums you’ve bookmarked will still work.

Visitors are encouraged to log in, not just to create discussions, documents and blogs, but also to personalize a list of Favorite Communities and set watches on discussions, documents, and blogs.

Here are the steps:

Get to know VMware Communities. The homepage brings together community-contributed content with links to related technical content from VMware.

 

Guests see an expandable / collapsible hierarchy of all sub-communities so you can easily navigate to the content you want. Guests should register and/or log in with your VMware Store account to take advantage of the personalizable My Favorite Communities list.

When you log into VMware Communities, the home page displays a My Favorite Communities list. Click Edit to personalize this list and display just the communities that you regularly visit. You can always navigate to any community using the All Communities list at the bottom of the page.

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The left column always contains links for participating in the community. For logged in members, the Action box at the top displays functions for contributing content. The boxes below help you navigate the communities by user or tag. The right column always contains context-sensitive information that is relevant to the community you are viewing.

That menu bar near the top of the page is present on all the other pages, too. It provides shortcut menus you'll find yourself using: All Communities for a list of all communities to visit, My Communities for your personalized list of favorite communities, My Content for your profile and items you've created or are working on, and Browse for viewing discussions, documents, blogs, people, tags, and history.

In the Find Content section of the tour you'll learn more about how to find content in VMware Communities.

Find Content

As you saw on the VMware Communities home page, you've got a number of paths into the content. You can browse by community, by tags and users, and you can search. This section of the tour will introduce you to VMware Communities's content-finding features.

Browse communities. Most content in VMware Communities is organized by communities (except blogs which are associated with users). In communities, you create, find, and organize content.

  1. Click the name of a community -- under My Favorite Communities or All Communities on the homepage, or in the My Favorite Communities or All Communities drop-downs at the top of this (and every) page. On the community's home page, you'll see the latest content of each other content type: Discussions and Documents. Use the All Content, Discussions, and Documents tabs to get more of each type.

If you haven't already, take a moment to browse your communities.

Browse by tags. When you browse by tags, you're using a community-made indexing system. You and other users apply tags like index keywords to new content to make the content more findable. You look for content you want by clicking tag names to see a list of related content. Wherever you go in VMware Communities, you'll see tags that group your content into categories.

  1. Look for the tag cloud. As community participants tag content, the home page for a community also shows something you'll probably find yourself using quite a lot: a tag cloud. A tag cloud visually groups tags so that you can look by popularity (more popular tags are in a larger font) as well as look by alphabetical order.

  1. See the content associated with a tag. Hover over a tag to see the number of times it is assigned to content. Click the tag to see a list of the items it's assigned to.

Search for content. Search for the content you want, filtering your search to refine the results. The search engine has been upgraded, so you can expect improved search results.

  1. Take a look at the Search box in the upper right corner.
  2. Type in what you want to search for, then click Search.

  1. See results on the Search page. You can filter search results by content type, by community, or by date.

Through browsing and searching VMware Communities you can look for the content you need. But what if you've found something you want to keep your eye on? By subscribing to RSS feeds or email notifications, you can get updated on changes to content you care about.

See the next part of the tour for an introduction to RSS and email notifications.

Subscribe to RSS feeds. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) gives you a way to get a digest of updates to the content or areas you're interested in. When you "subscribe" to an RSS feed — say, for particular search results or a particular tag or the content of a particular community — you can check back any time for a list of updates using your RSS aggregator (which might simply be your web browser). That list will include only the content you subscribed for. You can get an RSS feed for nearly everything in VMware Communities.

  • Click the RSS icon at the right side of your browser's address bar to subscribe to an RSS feed for the content you're looking at. For example, if you're using a recent version of the Firefox browser, you'll get a list such as the following if there are multiple feeds available.

If you've chosen to be prompted to pick an RSS aggregator (also known as an RSS reader), you might see a page such as the following. You can choose the reader you want to use and see what the feed would currently bring you.

If RSS sounds appealing, take a moment to get it set up. Select one of the VMware Communities RSS feeds and subscribe. If you select a reader to use for all feeds, subscribing is as easy as clicking the RSS icon where you see it in VMware Communities.

Get notified by email. In addition to RSS feeds, you can also stay on top of content using email notifications. When you sign up to receive email notifications, VMware Communities will send you email whenever the content you're interested in changes.

And even more interesting: you can respond to threads directly in your email notifications.

  • Navigate to a document you want to be notified about, then click Receive Email Notifications under Actions.

After you click, notice that VMware Communities will change the link to Stop Email Notifications. You can always come back here when you want to stop getting the email. You can also manage all of your notifications from your profile, as you'll see later in the tour.

In the Create Content section of the tour you'll learn more about the kinds of content you can create in VMware Communities.

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Create Content

You'll find the content you need with VMware Communities. But it gets interesting when you start to make your own contributions. As you join others in the community — asking and answering questions, creating the documents you need day to day, posting your thoughts to a blog — you'll discover ideas you wouldn't otherwise have seen.

Ask a question, get some quick feedback. Discussions are great for those brief questions and comments. It might start with a simple question.

  • Go to a community (or the homepage if you are logged in) and click Start a Discussion to start asking a question or make a quick post to find out what others think.

  1. Mark your post if it's a question. You can simply post a comment for feedback from others. But if you're asking a question, be sure to mark your post so that others know you'd like an answer.

  1. Tell others which responses got you where you wanted to go. When someone responds to your question with a post that's helpful or correct, mark it as such so that others know which is the best answer. You and other users get status points for helpful and correct answers.

Create a document to preserve thoughts. Wiki documents and uploaded files give you a way to get content into VMware Communities. With wiki documents, you edit the content right in VMware Communities. You and others can work on the same document, it's searchable, and you can specify that other users should review or approve the content. By uploading a file, on the other hand, you can add something that was created outside VMware Communities. Uploading the file makes it available to other users; you can tag the uploaded file to make sure it gets found.

A wiki document is for capturing information that others in the community would be interested in (or might need) — things like best practices, how-to's, check lists, conceptual explanations and practical guidelines. They're community documents.

  1. Go to a community (or the homepage if you are logged in) and click Create a Document to create and publish a document.

  1. Create a wiki document that's open. An open document can be edited by any other user. With a closed document, you'd add users as collaborators in order for them to be able to edit the document. This is a document you want everyone to be able to edit. (You'll read more about managing collaboration in the Collaborate on Content section of this tour.)

  1. Give the document a title and type your content in the editing window. Notice that you've got two ways to edit the document, along with a preview pane to see how your work is coming along. The rich text editor is like a word processing program, with tools for more advanced formatting.

The plain text editor (whose toolbar is shown below) offers simple formatting features, but is designed primarily for editing in the wiki markup style. Click the question mark help icon to see a list of wiki markup conventions you can use.

  1. Add tags to describe the document to other users. This is one of best things you can do for the community. As you and other users add tags, you'll develop your own way to describe the content everyone uses. It's also a good idea to use existing tags whenever possible. You can type the tag names, letting VMware Communities finish the name where the tag already exists; you can also click the tag in the Popular Tags list to add the tag to the document.

  1. You can click Save and Continue to save your work and keep writing. Click Publish when you're ready for others to see your document.
  2. After you've published the document, notice that the Actions box lists tasks related to the document. In particular, notice the Manage Versions and Manage Collaboration links. Clicking Manage Versions will display a page that lists versions of the document. You can select document versions in the list to compare changes to the document over time. The comparison shows additions and deletions.

Tip: You can make a document from a discussion! View the discussion in VMware Communities, then click the Convert thread to document link under Actions. Use this feature to identify the most valuable threads, edit them down to concise a question-and-answers or description of a solution or concept, and save them as documents. Over time, these documents will form the basis of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for each community.

Post your views to your blog. Whereas wiki documents are often authored by several community members, blogs are for more individual kinds of content. A blog is the voice of an individual (such as you). A blog is a like a column in a newspaper — it's there when you look for it, now and then offering something new to read. Unlike a newspaper column, though, others can comment on a blog.

If you've got a blog, you might post your views on something you just read that others in the organization might be interested in. Or you could evaluate or summarize something for the team, providing a way for others to give feedback through their comments on your blog.

  1. Click Write a Blog Post in the Actions box on the homepage (you must be logged in first) to post to your blog.
  2. If you're prompted, select the community in which you want your blog to appear.
  3. Notice that the blog editing page is very much like the discussion and document editing pages: the same rich text and plain text editors are available, along with a preview tab. Notice, too, that you get a number of shortcuts to tools that are specific to blogs. You can view the posts you've made, comments to your posts, trackbacks (links to other sites that have linked to your blog), and blog options such as moderation and RSS feed settings. The Extended Options section expands when you click its title. There, you can set options specific to this post — even set it to be published at a certain time.
  4. In the editing window, type a title and the content of your blog post.

  1. You can Save a draft of the post before you publish. As with discussions and documents, be sure to add tags before you click Publish; tags will help your post be easier for others to find.

Create a profile. Your profile is a quick way for other members of the community to find out more about you, which makes it easier for you to build valuable professional and personal connections with other community participants.

  1. Click My Content > Profile to view your profile.

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Collaborate on Content

Nearly everything you do in VMware Communities is collaborative. Content you add is almost always visible and searchable (unless you've explicitly indicated that it shouldn't be, as with closed documents). Other users read your work, you read theirs. You get ideas from someone else's blog, they comment with suggestions on your document.

But VMware Communities provides some capabilities that are especially collaboration-oriented. For example, you can create a document that other users can work on with you. You can manage who can edit your shared documents.

Manage collaboration.

  1. Go to a community and click Create a document in the Actions box to create a new document. Then select Start a new document and click submit. Finally add a title and your initial content, then click Save Draft.
  2. Or, go to My Content -> Documents and select a document that you created.
  3. In either case, you may click Manage Collaboration in the Actions box to add or remove collaborators and approvers, and to open or close comments.

VMware Communities will provide cues to the other collaborators that they have roles on this document. In particular, until it's published authors will have the document listed as a draft under their My Content menu (they'll also be able to submit the document for approval); approvers will be prompted by the VMware Communities user interface that they have a document to approve.

The My Content menu is a good place to get back to your work in progress.

When you get to a document needing your approval, the choices are clear.

This is the end of the VMware Communities tour, but it has really only scratched the surface. The best way to get to know VMware Communities is to put it to work by adding content and responding to the content other users have added. Give it a try!

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