To raise Bentley and our users' participation on Be Communities, as well as to minimize confusion about where to search, find, or post Bentley product technical support-related information, the MicroStation communities are being reorganized. The current structure, based on MicroStation releases, will be consolidated and a new, flatter hierarchy based on context-specific topics will be created. The result will look like this:
Note that we do not plan a "CR/TR" community... we have other, better plans for something along those lines. Each of these communities will have its own forum and wiki -- the "general" community and a few others will also have a blog and file area.
Please see further details below (it is quite lengthy, but it needs to be) and post comments or suggestions here.
Currently, there are a number of places on Be Communities where MicroStation and MicroStation PowerDraft users can go to get information and ask questions about those products. These include various forums, blogs, wikis, and file areas for a number of different MicroStation releases and subsystems. The number of choices has led to some confusion as to where to post inquiries. Since communities exist for context-specific topics (e.g. MicroStation Visualization, ProjectWise Programming, MicroStation Programming, etc.), it makes some amount of sense to consolidate the communities and applications into a few that are of similar context. In other words, make the communities more topical in nature as opposed to being release-specific.
We did this last year with the Programming community – see http://communities.bentley.com/help/f/9549/p/77292/212002.aspx#212002 for what was done there. It came off REALLY well and was well-accepted. That is really the premise behind our intent.
In essence, what exists on Be Communities now is one big location for MicroStation, except it is a bit of a challenge for our users (and ourselves) to navigate to get to the “right place”. Currently, the MicroStation area looks like this:
Yeah… it does :)
That should be reorganized up to help users get to where they need to get to. One thing that needs to be identified and accepted is that the number of areas needs to be kept a minimum. Spreading out across a number of communities/sub-communities/applications/sub-applications does the opposite of the good intentions usually sought. So the basic hierarchy would be:
What else comes out of this? And what is planned to execute on this?
There is existing content on the site that still has some value, so to retain that without starting anew, the overall layout would look something like:
It is much simpler and cleaner from a navigation perspective, since there is less of a “hierarchy” than what currently exists. The fact that there isn’t a one-to-one correlation of community or application to existing Support queue is not really relevant (have to get the “SAP way of doing things” out of our minds).
It is anticipated that all this can be done in a relatively short amount of time. We are looking at doing this over the May 25/26 weekend. Like other instances of community moves, there will be some disruption of links (i.e. anything that was hardcoded on the site or external to the site will need to be updated accordingly) and community activity will be reset, but we just wanted to provide some advance notice of this upcoming reorganization.
Michael Arens said: Maybe it also would be nice to clean up a bit the screenspace needed.
Maybe it also would be nice to clean up a bit the screenspace needed.
Thanks for the feedback. We scrunched that up a bit.
Maybe it also would be nice to clean up a bit the screenspace needed. When going to the Microstation Forum, wouldn't it be logical to see some new topics without having to scroll down???
Vertically divided, most of my screen is filled with a grayish gradient background , very informative... Horizontally divided, half of my browser screen is filled with old news, also very informative. We're not in the 90's anymore, please take a look at some other professional forums and how they handle user-friendlyness, UX please... (Or is it because Bentley programmes use their screens portrait-wise that this isn't changed?)
The reorganization is done. We even were able to optimize some of the community applications, reducing the number of "archived" applications than originally anticipated. There could be a few speedbumps left, so if you happen to encounter any, please let us know so they can be looked into.
Daft question but is this communities.bentley.com/.../default.aspx the new MicroStation forum? If yes can you remove all the announcements asap as they take far too much room.
We are not done yet, so patience... patience :) The main MicroStation community is the last one... once it is done (planned to be later today), we will identify that in a follow-up.