July 22nd Sprint Review

Unknown
Unknown
in Product

Demo Recording

Coming up!


Sprint Goals

  • Implement Member Search
  • Continue work with Ops on Elastic Search implementation


Member Search

Member Search is a new search component that will be delivered with our Elastic Search implementation later on this year.


Why did we do this?

https://media.giphy.com/media/xULW8MYvpNOfMXfDH2/giphy.gif

I know what you're thinking, this wasn't on the roadmap, so why did we decide to do this all of a sudden? Prospects and customers have been asking us about a Member Directory for quite some time. Prospects, agencies in particular, are often ready to chose some of our competitors, like Higher Logic, over Vanilla due to the critical nature of this type of feature. When one of the pillars of your business is to get your customers networking, users need to be able to easily find and connect with fellow community members, and Vanilla was only able to offer this through Group membership pages

This is shown through the data we've collected in Product Board where we've recorded feedback from 22 customers or prospects. Based on how critical the feature has been ranked through each insight shared, this gives Member Search a Customer Impact Score of 32, making it our 3rd highest ranked feature in Product Board.

When Oracle signed on with us, we agreed to deliver this feature for their launch September 30th. While this feature was not announced on our roadmap last fall, Team Supreme is an agile scrum team, which allowed us to make adjustments to our plans and deliver this highly requested feature ahead of schedule.


What is Member Search?

Member Search allows users to :

  • Browse a list of registered community members
  • Search for users based on:
    • Username
    • Email address or email domain
    • Role
    • Rank
    • Registration Date
    • Oldest Members
    • Recently Active Members
    • Name (alphabetically)
  • Sort their user list by:
    • Newest Members
    • Oldest Members
    • Recently Active
    • Name (Alphabetically)
Search_unify - Member Directory op2.png

How are permissions handled?

  • In order to access Member Search, users must have the Profile.View permission
  • Searching and viewing user emails or private roles is restricted to users who have the Personal Info.View permission. This means that generally, only Admins & Mods will be able to search users by email.
  • There is currently no way to disable or opt-out of being listed in Member Search, but we are considering these for a future enhancement to the feature.


What about custom profile fields?

We have received a lot of feedback about the necessity of allowing users to find each other based on custom profile information. For example users need to be able to find each other based on:

  • Geographic location
  • Job title
  • Industry
  • Organization
  • Skills

We do have plans to build upon our member search capabilities and bring in some of these more advanced options in the near future. Please continue to submit your feedback to Product Board (product@vanillaforums.com) to help us build out our user stories and roadmap for this feature.


Release Schedule

The release schedule for Member Search is to be determined. Member Search works exclusively with Elastic Search. As this has a major impact on each and every customer, Elastic Search will be rolled out to customers gradually over the course of several months. This schedule it to be determined with Ops. We will keep you up to date on the progress of this scheduling.

Comments

  • Unknown
    Unknown

    Can you think of a reason that a customer would not want member search turned on?

  • Unknown
    Unknown
    https://staff.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/4325#Comment_4325

    If not having it turned on there was some good feedback in the meeting about customers wanting to specifically restrict the ability to browse through all of a sites user's to a specific permission besides Profile.View.

    I tend to disagree a little bit though, because we have numerous places that you can enumerate the profiles anyways, then view the individual profile through the site or the API (like the mentions API).

  • Unknown
    Unknown
    https://staff.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/4325#Comment_4325

    Only 1 prospect recently said that if they were building a community of practice around a particular vertical they wouldn't want that list easily searched by competitors. I kind of thought the reasoning was pretty weak given that there's already tools like LinkedIn or zoom Info that give the same if not way more information.

  • Unknown
    Unknown

    As long as we don't reveal any PII like email unless it's specified that this info will be shared and the directory is naturally private/not available to search engine robots or crawlers... I guess it's ok?

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