The bright future of Communities of Practice on SmartUI

Very recently a partner of ours asked us to support them in a discussion they were having with a customer concerning the adoption of the SmartUI. 

The customer, a long-time Content Suite user, made extensive use of the Communities of Pratice (COP) module in the past. For this reason even thought the main topic of discussion was the customer’s use of the SmartUI in the near future, a large part of the conversation was actually focused the COP module

According to our partner's vision, when upgrading from Content Suite 10.5 to 16.2.latest and greatest, the customer should consider abandoning COP to embrace the new concept of Connected Workspaces (CWS). The two modules actually have lot in common, however there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the characteristics of the two. This led our partner to ask:

Can Module Suite fill in the gaps and help transitioning from COP to CWS ? And since we are talking about it, can this be done on SmartUI?

Given this input, we looked into COP and the customer’s specific usage of the module. It turned out that if the customer moved to CWS the missing pieces would have been: events, calendars, COP overview, polls, hot-topics. Therefore the next step was trying to re-imagine these features in the context of Connected Workspaces and SmartUI Perspectives.

Our R&D team came up with the following results:

Events and calendar

Implementing Events and Calendar with Beautiful WebForms offered the possibility of customizing the information tracked for each event. The WebForm object used to track this information was created as part of the Connected Workspace template assuring that any new instance would receive its own copy and would have independent data. The perspective tile in which we are displaying an events' information is yet again a Beautiful WebForm. This tile offers members with the "Practice Admins" role the possibility of registering a new event directly from this perspective.

Overview, Roles

To implement COP Overview it was decided that the best way forward was to utilize Beautiful WebForms. This decision was made with the intent to again provide greater flexibility when it came to deciding what to track and what would be the relevant type of COP. In other words, this means that for a different kind of COP we are able to track and present completely different sets of information. A Beautiful WebForm surfaced in the perspective tile allows COP admins to customize with just a single click the information that is displayed.

Polls

Polls are a collection of opinions on a specific subject, taken from a selected group of people for analytical purposes, aren't they ? What's better than WebForms to do just that ? We implemented poll feature offering COP administrators the possibility of creating brand new Polls by leveraging our low-coding visual Form Builder.

Hot-Topics

Surprisingly, to implement the concept of Hot-Topics Beautiful WebForms was not utilized but rather Module Suite’s scripting solution Content Script. The solution was to create a custom and dynamic Content Script node table and to surface it as a tile within the SmartUI