Greetings element14 community members!
The site has undergone a number of changes since we launched a little over a year ago, and we've realized we need a means of communicating some of the changes and new features to you. So, please bookmark this blog as we will use this space to announce new features, and give you a some helpful hints on how to make the most of all the options the element14 website offers to you. We also welcome your comments here in the Feedback and Support space (that is the name of the space after all!) so we can continue to improve the site to better meet your needs.
We just upgraded element14 to a new version this past Monday and there were a LOT of new things in this recent release. Below is a list of a few of them. Nicole and I (your friendly neighborhood community administrators) will be writing additional blog posts in the next couple weeks with a more in-depth look at some of the items mentioned below.
You may notice the search box is now front AND center on the site. We've heard lots of feedback that the search box was a little hard to spot on the site so we hope this makes it easier for you all to use. If you start typing in a search term, you'll also notice that we have search "look-ahead" which will start to give you some results without even having to sumit your sarch query.
Those of you who are registered members will also notice the "parts list" has moved! It is no longer embedded into the right-hand side of the page, but is now "docked" to the bottom right of your screen on EVERY page of the site. You can expand or collapse this as you wish, and can still add parts linked with a green plus icon (examples in the images below) into your parts list for future purchase or to email to yourself or a colleague.
Some of the other new features on the site to keep an eye out for (that we'll be giving you a more in-depth look at in future blog posts) include:
- Improvements to RoadTest
- Video upload/player that is simple to use
- Better email notification management (now you can consolidate your updates into one weekly, biweekly or monthly update to reduce the number of email you get!)
- Document preview (Microsoft documents and pdfs are now rendered in the page so you can view without having to download and open)
- Private Documents and Discussions
- Additional Personalization options (more layout options for your personal home page, and more widgets)
- Additional privacy settings in your profile (choose whether to share the fields on your profile and with whom)
- Improvements to the rich text editor (standard keyboard shortcuts for copy, paste, undo, etc are supported)
- HTML Email
- Community Activity Stream (a little like Facebook's "wall" where you can filter and see activity by your contacts or across the site)
- Microblogging in your "status" (similar to posting on the Facebook wall, or using Twitter)
- "Liking" (now you can "like" a particular piece of content to show you approve and boost its popularity and value to the community)
- Discussion posts marked as the "answer" to a question now show up at the top of the discussion thread
and my personal favorite, you can now request a forgotten USERNAME as well as your password!
Those are just a few of the major improvements - there are even more little fixes and improvements throughout the site.
If you particularly like (or dislike) one of the new features on the site, please let us know!
Tune in to the next edition for a deeper look at the improvements we've made to the RoadTest space.