September 16th Sprint Review

Demo Slides

Sprint Goals

• Continue work towards Elastic Search
• Polish Community Events
• Bonus: iFrame support for KB

? Elastic Search Update

Last sprint, we accomplished one of our main goals with Elastic Search by getting it enabled on active environments. Elastic search is now running on:

• Vanilla R&D Demo
• Vanilla Staff
• Oracle Production (MOSC)

When will Elastic Search be available to all of our clients?

It will be at least another 3 months before we can fully launch Elastic Search to the masses. This is thus considered a Q1 goal. However, we do plan on being able to enable Elastic to early adopters in Q4.

What's left to be done for an Elastic Search roll-out?

In the meantime Team Supreme & Ops will continue to work on Search improvements:

• Improvements to Multilingual Search - September 30th
• Remove Sphinx from KB - September 30th
• Configure an automatic Elastic set up - October 14th
• Optimize API endpoints - TBD
• [Ops] Deploy a general infrastructure for ElasticSearch - TBD
• [Ops] Rollup ElasticSearch per Cluster basis - TBD
• [Ops] Decommission Sphinx's instances - TBD

? New Search features:

In sprint 2020.019 the team focused on 3 main objectives for Search:

• Reintroduce our tags filter
• Add an Ideas filter
• Make sure comments in search results are grouped by discussion.

?️ Tags Filter:

Our Search page has long included a Tags filter for search results. When we updated the search page, this filter was removed until the team had time to make improvements to our API. This sprint we've reintroduced the tags filter to allow users to narrow their search results.

? Ideas Filter:

Customers have long been asking for an easier way to search through their community Ideas. We've offered a means to filter search results to Discussions, Polls, Articles, and Questions, but and Ideas filter has been missing from the set. This sprint we've added an Ideas filter to help customers find ideas.

? Group comments by discussion:

We've received a ton of feedback about the quality of our search results. One of the common pain points we heard was that search would often surface the same discussion over and over, burying other results. In the bellow example, the term "Email Digest" is used in several comments on a discussion titled "Email Digest" causing each comment to appear in the search auto-complete, and search results.

This sprint we've made some updates to address this concern by grouping search results by discussion. Now, instead of showing each comment as its own search result, the discussion will appear once, with an indication of the number of matching comments within the thread. Users can then use this link to drill down into the discussion and browse through the comments that match their query.

? Events Polishing

Community Events was completed with Release 2020.012 and made available to our customers by June 29th 2020. We've been collecting feedback since then and devoted some resources this sprint to addressing some of this. With this release we have:

• Made some improvements to Events navigation. We received feedback that the UX was confusing when navigating away from the Event pages.
• Added an Event URL field to allow event managers to easily link users to online events, or external event pages.

⭐ Bonus: iFrame Support for Knowledge Base

With every Sprint Team Supreme has a set number of points reserved for bug fixing. We take on a set of support tickets and aim to patch issues as part of our sprint goals. These are very rarely demoed as they aren't introducing new functionality. Every once in a while however, we receive a support request that gives us the opportunity to turn a bug fix into a valuable product update. This sprint, we were lucky enough to get one of these rare gems and are proud to announce that Knowledge Base articles now support iframe embeds.

The problem:

Meridian Link migrated from Kayako this summer. Hundreds of articles were imported into their new KB. These articles included some custom embeds, including embedded Smartsheet tables. While our Rich Editor does not support Smartsheet embeds, we are able to migrate and render this content in its original format. When this type of custom content is migrated, it is maintained, until the customer edits the article. Editing the article updates its format, essentially breaking the custom content.

This was reported to Team Supreme via Support here - https://github.com/vanilla/support/issues/2606

The solution

We reviewed this as a team and identified the goal of our fix - Content creators need to be able to edit their imported articles without losing content.

Our options were:

• Explain the limitation to the client, and offer to build Smartsheet Smart Embeds as a service. Not only would this leave a bad taste in the customer's mouth, but it left us and the client vulnerable to future escalations as other unsupported embed-types are discovered.
• Allow for iFrame embeds in Knowledge Base articles to offer KB users more embedding options.

With release 2020.019, we have added iframe embed support into their articles. Not only does this allow customers like Meridian Link to maintain their legacy content, but it will also allow KB users the ability to embed a lot more content LIKE:

• A Google Calendar
• A Trello Board
• Facebook posts
• A Spotify playlist
• Videos & Images
• Pretty much anything that can be rendered in an iFrame

N.B. iFrame Embeds are only available in KB

Demo Questions:

When will Elastic Search be made available on Sales Demo?

Elastic Search is now running on our R&D Demo, and on our staff forum. We will work with R&D and Ops to determine a timeline for getting Elastic Search and all new related features up and running on sales demo.

Will the Elastic Search update cause breaking changes to the API once released?

Our search updates should not introduce any breaking changes to our /search endpoints.

What are "Places" again?

Our new Elastic Search pages includes a section for "Places." This allows users to find Categories, Groups & KBs that match their search queries. For example, if I search "Community Management" I can find:a

• any category where the name or description matches, such as our "Community Management Hub" category.
• any Knowledge Base where the name or description matches, such as a "Community Management Guide"
• any Group where the name or description matches, such as a "Community Managers" group

With the latest updates to the Tags Filter in search, have we added Tagging support to API V2?

Users can use the Tag filter on /search endpoint, this is true of any search filter you see in the UI.

Customers however would like ability to add and remove tags to discussions via API. This is not yet possible, but Product has taken note of this for future updates to the API.

How does the new Event link behave when the "Link Types" add-on is enabled?

We had not tested this out prior to the demo, but have since run some tests on our Demo forum. This does not work well with the Link Types add-on. Tickets have been filed to address the issues.

What can users embed with the new iFrame embeds in KB Articles? Can users embed a quiz, for example?

Users can embed any content that is in an iframe. Many sites provide embed code as part of their share settings, e.g. Google Calendar offers embed code for individual calendars. If this is presented in an iframe, it can be embedded into an article.