Brace Rennels

What is the “Social Journey” and why is it important to integrate community and web together? I realized that some of you may be asking that question why would I put my team and community through this process and spend the level of effort to make it happen. Well, the answer is 48% and that is justification enough but I feel like I need to explain this concept of “The Social Journey” first before I get into the details of why 48% is the answer. The social journey came about as a discussion between myself and a few peers two years ago. The conversation kind of started around the importance of social to the business and how we could better engage our customers, prospects, and identify specific user behavior to provide some type of predictive analytics to improve their user experience. Help our users find the information being searched quicker and then suggest other re... (more)

A Pandemic Exercise - Telecommuting & Will the Infrastructure Support It?

I attended a pandemic exercise at Northeastern University last year that was really enlightening and timely considering the latest information about the “swine flu”. Although far from a pandemic at this time, the CDC is taking preventative measures by communicating with the general public what they can do to avoid becoming ill. Here are a few tips that can help spread the transmission. Hygiene- Wash your hands, it sounds insignificant but good hygiene can prevent the transmission by touching objects that others who have the influenza have also touched. Avoid any hand to mouth, e... (more)

Upgrading to Jive 6.0: Another Step in the Social Journey

About four months ago we were asked what our community teams needed to accelerate our plans to upgrade to the latest version of the Jive Software platform and redesign the experience. The answer basically came back that we needed an “All Hands On Deck” approach from all teams, including vendors. We outlined our plans and began setting up weekly sprints and daily standup meetings to accelerate the design, upgrade and integration customizations to the community to integrate with the website. So while the design team and our agency Razorfish started interviewing the community member... (more)

Categorize community structure for improved site navigation

So, as my team continued our accelerated community 3.0 plans our next obstacle was how to categorize our community structure in order to align with our .com architecture and keep the navigation consistent between the two sites. We have several issues. One is we have many products that have multiple communities some focused around support, others are beta lab forums, developer forums, education/certification and subject matter expert exchanges. We didn’t have to start from scratch as many of the .com categories fit but we released that just organizing the communities into topic... (more)

Five Tips for Consolidating and Protecting Your Data Center

There are several challenges when attempting a data center move or even just consolidation. Availability is the number one priority. All the systems during the move need to be available so production operations are not interrupted. Depending on the technology you use some solutions will require more downtime than others. If you are consolidating to a blade or virtual machine infrastructure then you also need to prepare for provisioning new servers rapidly. Here are a few tips to help maximize your data center uptime while facilitating a move, migration and or consolidation. Avai... (more)