The New GeoNet Platform Launches on November 12

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11-04-2020 05:10 PM
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by Anonymous User
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Take one last look around at the community as you've known it for the past few years.

As of November 12, 2020, everything you see here will have updated to our new community platform.

COMMUNITY OUTAGE NOTICE: Due to the GeoNet Community Platform Update, the community will be inaccessible from Tuesday, November 10, 2020 at 7:00 p.m. PST through Wednesday, November 11, 2020. The new platform will be accessible on Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Key Takeaways in this message

 

Key Actions

Remember: Save Your Content

At this time, we recommend you take any last measures to save personal content that you may have accumulated since our previous announcement, including bookmarks, follows, notifications, inbox messaging, photos, personal blogs, and more. Review our last announcement for a list of content that will not migrate and will not be available in the new platform to take action:

 

E-mail Digests and Weekly Newsletters

Automated e-mail digests and weekly newsletters will expire once the new platform is launched. In the new platform, you will be able to recreate email subscriptions to places, content boards, and labels at a frequency of your choosing.

 

 

For curated Weekly Digests from the GeoNet Team, subscribe to our Community Blog board in the new platform where we’ll continue to post GeoNet Weekly News featuring highlights from around the community.

 

Listening to Your Feedback

More than 1,000 of you participated in community feedback loops, including our most recent survey!

From previous community-wide surveys (@mention survey article) and general feedback provided to us over time, we collected your thoughts on ways the community could be improved. We are pleased to report that you can expect the following updates in your community experience:

 

Top 7 Features to Look Forward to Based On User Feedback

 

1. Wayfinding and Navigation

  • The community structure is flatter and organized by Places where Products, Developers, Industry, and other communities are located along with User Groups.
  • A simple structure comes with simplified navigation. Users can browse the community from the top navigation bar that includes a mega menu to access communities and convenient areas to access help with the platform.
  • The megamenu is a dynamic feature that will display the top 11 most viewed places in each product, industry, developer, and worldwide community for quick access.
  • A pinned search feature in the top navigation will be accessible from any location within the community as a way to jump to other desired locations.
  • Most noticeably, you will not see a double navigation bar as you do in the current platform.

2. Search

  • More search and filtering capabilities are available to find content of interest in the platform. You will find additional options to sort results by views, kudos (the new equivalent for "likes"), and replies in addition to the sorting features you are already familiar with.
  • If you are in a Place, you can limit the search to content within a place or content type.
  • Auto-suggestions in search will remain a search support tool in the new platform, with the ability to turn the feature on or off.
  • You can access a search feature in the top navigation menu to search content or places across the community from any location.

3. Content and Archives

  • Many users noted that there is an abundance of outdated content in the community. To provide more current search results, we will be implementing an archival rule on questions, videos, events, and discussions from before 2019 with view counts that have less than 100 views. Blogs will be available with no archival rules applied. Any content that is in a Group will not be subject to any archival rules.
  • Please note: Archived content will not be deleted, just removed from the general community's view or access. Content in the archive can be requested to bring forward by reaching out to the GeoNet team.

4. Subscriptions & Notifications

  • Create your customized email updates on places, groups, labels (a similar concept to categories), or discussions that you want to follow.

5. Logging in

  • We've aligned our accounts system more closely with Esri Accounts to reduce the issues around account connectivity and removed the duplicate "Sign In" features to the community.
  • To login to the community when it launches: Login through ArcGIS Online using your existing credentials. If you are signed in an Esri.com website and come to the community from where you are signed in, you will automatically be signed into the community under that account with our Single Sign-On (SSO) implementation.
  • For privacy, you can change your username associated with your account and control the display of your contact information in the community. Usernames can be updated by the user but must always be unique, meaning there cannot be duplicative usernames in the community.  

6. User Interface

  • The user interface is significantly updated to align with Esri's brand. You will notice a cleaner user interface that focuses on content without clutter. Places and Group page layouts are consistent across the community.

7. Added Solutions for Community Participation and Responses

  • Members will receive automatic email reminders to respond to their posts with replies from the community. In the email, they are encouraged to mark answers as Accepted Solutions if one is provided to their post.
  • New: More than one response can be an Accepted Solution to a post. Members can "kudos" the Accepted Solution that works the best for them to upvote a select reply.
  • Questions will have increased visibility with members who subscribe to question content boards.

 

Additional Improvements to the Community Experience:

 

A new Rank feature will be applied to member profiles to help community members identify new and experienced community members.

 

New Badges are available to acknowledge your participation in the community and will feature in a section within your profile.

 

1st Comment Badge  Responder

 

New Avatar Collections feature Esri's The Science of Where, Globie, and more.

Avatar Collection

 

Overall, this community offers the ability to grow with your needs. By selecting a leading community platform provider, we can enhance our platform to enrich your experience and serve 200,000 registered members and millions of visitors to the community. We look forward to implementing ongoing improvements to your experience. 

 

We'll see you on the new platform!

21 Comments
George_Thompson
Esri Frequent Contributor

I am excited to see the new platform!

RobertBorchert
Frequent Contributor III

Oh great.  The current platform was a huge downgrade from what we had in the world of wanting to make it more like Face Book.  What we have now was so poorly thought out and published.  I hope they actually listened to people this time and can make it a better resource.   

VHolubec
Esri Regular Contributor

Leslie Fountain‌, Michelle Mathias‌, we are looking forward so much. Good luck.

BrianLeroux
Occasional Contributor III

I really hope it turns out better than this current mess. I used to contribute quite often to the community back when it was a normal forum. The GeoNet changes made it fairly unusable so I have really been missing out. 

RobertBorchert
Frequent Contributor III

I really liked how you could see a compact list of all the groups and how many new posts there were all on a single page.

SteveCole
Frequent Contributor

3. Content and Archives

  • Many users noted that there is an abundance of outdated content in the community. To provide more current search results, we will be implementing an archival rule on questions, videos, events, and discussions from before 2019 with view counts that have less than 100 views. Blogs will be available with no archival rules applied. Any content that is in a Group will not be subject to any archival rules.
  • Please note: Archived content will not be deleted, just removed from the general community's view or access. Content in the archive can be requested to bring forward by reaching out to the GeoNet team. 

Do not agree with this. If you want to de-prioritize it in search results, fine, but actively hiding it and forcing users to jump through extra hoops to find answers to their problems isn't acceptable. Sure, searching why I'm getting a 401 redirect error when trying to log into Portal is a niche problem compared to someone who can't figure out how to change a symbol in ArcGIS Pro but c'mon. And why 2019? 2012, 2014-15 would be a better cut off for this. Last year? What makes 2019 a "quantum shift" year?

The bottom line for me is that you never know where the answer to your problem will appear. I do not like ESRI making that decision for me.

BrianLeroux
Occasional Contributor III

I agree with this. Why not just create a search option to include searching archived items?

DavidWheelock2
Occasional Contributor II

Here, here, Steve Cole!  It's those bizarro problems that require the older content with fewer views.

RobertBorchert
Frequent Contributor III

Maybe it would be more helpful if the also updated the help section to reflect versions of software it was accessed from . I find it frustrating sometimes to enter help from inside Pro or Map and  you find and answer and the prompts it gives you do not in anyway match the options you have in your version. 

DavidWheelock2
Occasional Contributor II

Brian Leroux, I second that suggestion.

DavidHoy
Esri Contributor

We are agreed - it would still be very useful to be able to search for older posts - even if this was not default search.

Perhaps a radio button enabling discovery of posts > (say) 2 years.

AndrewQuee
Occasional Contributor III

I don't want to be negative but Esri has form with wiping out all community content/resources every few years, leading to massive frustration as years of work/solutions/highlighted problems are irrevocably lost and we have to start again fro scratch.  Also sometimes legacy resrouces need to be revisited.  I know of projects still using VB6/VBA under ArcGIS 9...

I look forwards to being pleasantly surpised this time, but we shall see.

DavidWheelock2
Occasional Contributor II

Disk space is cheap.  Old content requires so little to store compared to modern content.  Keep it for reference. 

RobertBorchert
Frequent Contributor III

Isn't ESRI pushing us to use The Cloud.  Lots of space there.

jcarlson
MVP Esteemed Contributor

Not that you all don't have very valid points here, but I hope you actually submitted such ideas to the various surveys and calls for feedback that the GeoNet folks have been putting out there since this update was announced back in February.

TikaAdhikari
Occasional Contributor

Looking good stuff in new platform 

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi @Anonymous User 

I tried signing in today and found that I have been disconnected from my original profile.

https://community.esri.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/159842

 

Can someone please assist?

 

Thanks.

DerrickWong
Esri Contributor

@Anonymous User 

Hmm, it seems like my work email is tied to my old profile and the above new one?

If I sign in via Okta, I get this old profile, if I use my email and sign in, I get a new one.

 

My colleagues are experiencing the same.

 

@Anonymous User 

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi @DerrickWong, Yes, logging in through the internal channel is the correct way to access your account.  All staff and distributors should access the community through Okta.

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

For the last 2 weeks I've been using my new linked account to the community and all of sudden today, I try to log in and it does not recognize me and wants me to create a new account. I was confused, thinking it was my old public GIS account so now I have 2 and all my saves and recent communications are on my active profile. What the heck?! How do I get rid of this brand new profile and reconnect to my old one? I can see it but I'm not connected to it. Please help! My user name/profile is not Kwalsh351 but Kristal.Walsh.  Thank you, Kristal Walsh

by Anonymous User
Not applicable

Hi @Anonymous User, If you have multiple AGOL accounts, you may have entered the community under a different account and thus was prompted to create this account.

To access your other account, you'll need to make sure the AGOL account you are logged into is the one that is connected to that account. Can you double-check your AGOL logins? We can delete Kwalsh351 once you've successfully identified the account and are able to log in. 

 You can email us at geonet@esri.com if you need further assistance.