Welcome to the element14 Community!

The element14 Community was started just over 10 years ago now, with the intention of being a home and Community for Electrical and Electronics Design Engineers and Hobbyists and Makers alike, in conjunction with presenting relevant products from the Farnell range of stores available globally.

When the site was conceived, we chose a Community vendor, content management system, platform...whatever you wish to call it, called Jive. The internet landscape was rather different about ten years ago. Social media was only just hitting its stride with sites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, and forums were still very commonplace. We needed an environment that supported a mixture of media including videos, images, diagrams, and technical documents and whitepapers all in one place that would allow our members to comment, share and revisit. Along with our activities such as giveaways, competitions, and reviews, we created some custom content such as RoadTests, Design Challenges, and integrated our webinar providers (like WebEx) into Events.

Technology moves on and so do requirements. Those who're familiar with Jive will know of its quirks, it isn't great for social sharing, and editing and inserting your content can be cumbersome in the day of HTML5, CSS and HTTP2. Additionally, our current site has suffered from the usual technical challenges - slow performance at times and periodic outages. While the development team has done a lot of profound work and customisation on the website, the underlying platform has started to creak.

Over the past 6-12 months to November 2021 we have been working hard behind the scenes, arranging contracts, drafting up requirements, raising support requests and observing the different alternatives, and we've finally made a decision that we believe will be sufficiently familiar to all of our members, to our staff, and also allow us to transition into a better Community in the future with more features.

For that we've chosen to migrate the element14 Community website over to Verint's Community platform. It's taken some customising, tweaking, and there'll be adjustments to make for everyone - but we believe it'll be a better experience overall.

Why are we upgrading?

It's time for something new, fast and gives us more opportunities to give you a great element14 Community experience. We've heard your feedback on the discussions, comments, and surveys over the years and we now have the opportunity to upgrade to something better, newer, faster, up to date, and supported by better infrastructure!

In 2017/2018 Jive was purchased by Aurea Software. This had implications for the platform which they blogged about, but the links to the blog posts about this are now dead. There are many issues with Jive that have become evident as time has passed, from how it handles spam, to being user friendly and being confusing to users. Behind the scenes the other issue is that Jive dropped support for self-hosted platforms and sold off the support contracts to third parties, but halted any further development on it. Jive have 'hosted solutions', but that isn't Community. Jive are now mainly (though technically always have been) a hosted enterprise intranet solution and not a public facing self-hosted website platform.

So what did that mean to us?

It meant that we are on a fixed time limit. The version of Jive we're running would eventually be end of life, including the nitrostudio bunchball contract that was combined with it, and getting support for it with the new owners was gradually becoming more difficult. The companies which the support contracts were sold to ultimately wanted everyone to move from Jive to another platform, because they had their own.

We had to find something that:

• Has good technical support from the vendor
• Is customisable
• Gives the advantage of more features
• Ideally is faster as a platform
• If nothing else, is a good 'like for like' swap in to reduce confusion for us and our users
• Supported gamification (points and badges)

Being on a fixed time limit, which ended up being the space of a year or less, to change from one platform to another has been a huge undertaking and strain on the team as we've worked to specify  requirements, hardware needs, what we can transfer, how we transfer it, working with consulting developers as well as our in-house developers, asking for some of you to be our beta testers, and ultimately we have had to cut some corners until the platform's released because the support contract and licenses for Jive will expire soon and we can't renew them.

We're confident that the new choice of platform is ultimately better for us and you, the users. It took us 10 years to get Jive into a better place, and we'll be taking what we learned from that into the new platform to make sure it's in a good place for all of us as we migrate. We will soon be welcoming our new public facing Verint Community.

What's being transferred?

Everything we can. Active user accounts, your blog posts, RoadTest reviews, discussions, comments, etc. There will be changes to how it's laid out, but everything should still be in the same category of groups as it was originally. Also the points you have earned in gamification, and the badges/achievements.

We are taking this opportunity to also clean up a lot of content from the element14 Community. For example there have been a lot of changes to the identification of spam content, so that needs to go. There were also a lot of groups and spaces relating to very old campaigns, marketing and internal teams which also need to be cleaned up and removed.

There are also a number of groups that are more public and member facing which we will be removing. Some of that content has already been made private or removed from the site. I've heard your concerns as some of you want to back up your content (Community Site Clean-Up - Read if you're a long time member with old content on the site ) and you've asked for a list of the groups/spaces that're being removed or have been. I'll update this thread with more information on that.

Because of this clean up, it should make finding content/navigating on the new site easier. There'll be a change to the navigation menu at the top, which will be categorised, and when you visit those categories, there will be sub categories, forums, blogs for those groups and areas. There will also be a very good 'search' function that can browse and search categories and all content across the site when you're on the homepage, and when you're in a group it becomes contextual for that group (but can be expanded).

To confirm, if you have an active account on the element14 Community, all of your content will be copied over.

What're the benefits of upgrading?

From both our internal testing teams and the closed beta testing we performed with a mixture of our element14 presents crew and top members, we have some stand-out benefits of the new site:

• A new, cleaner look and layout
• Faster load times, served by new servers
• Greater control over how points and achievements are earned in gamification
• A different search engine, allowing you to find and filter content searches
• New features and functionality, if not for members then for staff to serve up content
• The same awesome content - we're bringing over practically everything!
• Groups are better categories of content - you can find multiple forums of conversation within a group
• Less confusing navigation - we've cleaned up a lot of the 'spaces' and 'groups' and now you navigate based on topic or technology
• URLs have changed - we've put in a lot of forwarding, but we're moving away from www.element14.com/community to community.element14.com !

What does this mean for you and what you'll need to do now we're live!

All active user accounts will be migrated to the new website platform. Your password cannot be migrated.

To use the new website platform, you have to reset your password using your e-mail address.

Be sure to check your 'junk mail' or 'spam' folders for the password reset e-mail. Because the address we're sending out from is new you may experience the e-mail going to your junk mail folder. Please ensure that you permit any e-mails from the address 'communitymessages.element14.com' and add them to any exception filters you may have.

If you didn't make sure you had a valid, accessible e-mail address on your user account you will need to get in touch via Feedback and Support now that the new website is live and I'll help you to sort out your account. Else you'll have to register for a new account.

Known Issues

The Feedback and Support area of the new site will be your go-to for your answers, Site FAQ and where to post your questions about the new site and for you to see any known issues that we've identified.

Drafts

If you had any content that was in progress, whether it's a RoadTest Review, Design Challenge application, blog, or other content that is 'saved as a draft' or in a 'draft status' then it did not come over to the new platform.

If you have any concerns or further questions about RoadTest Reviews being in draft and needing to be written up/published, you can reach out to rscasny directly as they would like to know if anyone still has any reviews in draft.

Blogs

There is one major change that came with the new site because of how it functions and operates and that is to blogs.

Read here for more information:

/members-area/support/w/site-faq/27300/how-do-i-create-a-blog-post-where-are-my-personal-blog-posts

Mobile Layout

We will still be tweaking the layout and view on mobile devices. Thanks for your patience and provide any feedback in Feedback and Support

Landing Page Layouts

We have been working up until the date of the new Community site coming online, but also we'll be working after it as well to make sure the website looks how it's supposed to. Our priority is to have everything working from a technical and practical standpoint, and the last part will be how everything looks.

Achievements / Badges / Challenges

Because we're moving to the new way gamification works in Verint, we're still familiarising ourselves with how these are triggered.

There will be are 'stock' or 'default' point actions and achievements/badges/challenges available when the site goes live, but the more custom challenges relating to website events and other interactions (think event attendance to events, creating roadtest applications, reviews, etc.) are still being created as we get used to the switchover to using JavaScript and Velocity script to code up the requirements.

Welcome to the new Verint element14 Community platform!

Thank you for staying with us throughout this journey. If you have any queries or concerns please share them by adding a comment, reaching out to cstanton or posting in Feedback and Support