In this Article

The Telligent Evolution Suite marries business with IT, designers with developers, and enterprise investments with social technology. The suite integrates social tools into the workplace, not bypassing your existing investments in enterprise technology. It ensures that your business can extract the maximum amount of value from the tools you already have.

Key enhancements

Social engagement, extensibility, content quality, reputation, and a more engageing activity stream are the hallmarks of Telligent Community Release 7.0. We have introduced new enhancements to create a socially empowered employee experience:

Social engagement

In this release, Telligent presents powerful Social engagement tools and a revamped activity stream that raise your community's social IQ like never before.

Social engagement tools

  • Abuse service - Take advantage of community vigilance to filter out abusive content by flagging a post, comment, reply, or status message.
  • Like service - Social promotion at its simplest and best. Use the like service to promote comment, post, reply, and status content quality. Encourage relationships in your community by linking to member profiles.
  • Mentions service - Social is the new normal as you foster relationships by pulling members into conversations using @mentions in comments, applications, posts, replies, and status messages.
  • Rating service - Capture content helpfulness or quality sentiment for your community using rating scales like stars.
  • Scoring service - Community metrics incorporate content quality and aging to present an accurate picture of what's best in your community, and to advance this content in search results.
  • Tag service - Create more powerful, wide-reaching discussions by using #hashtags to key on conversations throughout your community. This service incorporates #hashtag support for conversations and status messages into search results.
  • The comment service is redesigned in this release to provide modular support to other services while streamlining operations and improving performance.

The social engagement tool model simplifies and streamlines system services and provides exciting  new capabilities.

Activity stream

With the new Activity Story Stream widget, Telligent adds personality, immediacy, and involvement to your community's conversation. Members are engaged by likes, mentions, #hashtags, private messages, and commenting/replying that's easier than ever. Content such as videos or pictures can be viewed directly from the stream. If your site has Document Preview installed, documents can also be previewed from the stream.

Sign-in and user create options

Telligent Community 7.0 makes user sign-in simpler by letting you specify the email address sign-in option on the User - Login and Create widget.

Users who are joining the community can be validated with the new ReCaptcha option.

Extensibility changes

Telligent Evolution 7.0 builds in powerful new extensibility tools for third-party content, development, and search.

Interact with content outside your community

The core services increase your community's reach by encouraging members to incorporate third-party content into nearly all community interactions - including posts, comments, replies, and activity messages.

Develop third-party applications on the platform

Powerful new APIs make it easier than ever to capitalize on the platform for your applications.

Search extensibility

Using the APIs in this release, you can create custom content type plugins for your own applications and have that content indexed by Solr search. Make search results more meaningful to your community by customizing the search result page with your own result categories and metadata definitions.

In this release, it's easier than ever to implement your own search provider or indexing service using the APIs.

CFS

The Centralized File System is now easier to configure, is extensible via plugins, and exposes events to handle file storage changes in plugins.

Content quality

Organically discover and promote the best content in your community - promoting the highest quality content to the top of search results for askers. Top-quality users for a group can be listed, and the groups where a user is a top-quality author can be listed on his/her profile page.

Reputation

Release 7.0 builds reputation from the inside out using content likes, ratings, scores, suggested answers, and comments to feed data into metrics which cue members to the highest quality authors in the community.

Other new features

  • HTML5 support - Telligent Community 7.0 supports HTML5 audio and video in browsers where that format is supported.
  • Plugins - As part of the modular and upgrade-safe platform model in 7.0, many features are implemented as plugins. New plugins include CSModules, APIs, file viewers, and activity message types.
  • Import or export headers and footers - Import or export headers or footers from the Edit Header or Edit Footer interface.
  • Username or email address login - Registered users can now log in with their username or email address.
  • Widget wrapping in themes - There is support for defining widget wrapping formats within themes.

Changes in this release

The change list below is not exhaustive. For more information, see the Release notes.

Changed requirement

  • Solr 3.6 must be used with this release.

Changed features

  • Chameleon, which was previously deprecated, has been removed in this release.
  • Restv1, which was previously deprecated, has been removed in this release.
  • The rating type tooltips in the post rating scales (one star = "poor," two stars = "fair," etc.) are replaced with a tooltip that shows the average rating out of the number of ratings received.
  • The Enterprise theme has the RSS option for applications hidden in application banner widgets. (So for example, you will not see an RSS link on a Blog - Banner widget in the Enterprise theme, but you will see it in the Fiji theme.) Feeds are still available in Enterprise if you know the URL for the feed.
  • The Group - Membership List no longer sorts for top group members. This function is now performed by the new Group - Members List widget.
  • When a site is created, the Reporting forum in the Administrators group is no longer created as it was in previous releases. The new spam and report abuse feature can autohide offensive content rather than creating a forum post as a report.
  • When importing page themes, you are notified of individual pages containing scoped properties and can elect not to commit those fields.
  • Manage Widgets sorts by inclusion or installation differences or theme differences.
  • In Manage Widgets, when the widget is saved, so are changes to theme types in which the widget is accessible/visible.
  • Important events are logged to the Windows event log instead of only to internal event log in order to make it easier for an administrator to monitor a site for possible attacks or breaches.
  • The plugin manager has an opt-in plugin interface (IInstallablePlugin) that manages version differences and controls when the plugin should be installed/upgraded and uninstalled.
  • Developers can access CFS.
  • Registered users can upload a user file in a status message.
  • Registered users can start conversations with friends from the conversation list.
  • The term "conversations" has been replaced in many places in the platform with the term "messages."
  • The term "favorite" is frequently replaced with "bookmark" in Enterprise theme widgets for the Enterprise theme.
  • In the Start a Conversation dialog box, "Recipients" has been changed to "Friends" to remove confusion about whom you can share with.
  • In mirrored blog feeds, posts are attributed back to the original author on the remote site.
  • Wiki page authors or contributors are notified of comments on a wiki page.
  • A content author can modify number lists in the rich text editor with shift-tab.
  • All links in the content editor are converted to hyperlinks.
  • A site or group manager can either configure (in widget configuration) or remove (in Widget Studio) the status message option from Quick Post widget to not allow status messages to be submitted.
  • The Activity Story Stream status message story type can be removed from the plugin manager.
  • Factors that future-dated blog posts affect such as activity messages, the Email Digest, featured content, search, and post lists - are governed by the actual publication date rather than the origination date.
  • The File Viewer Options tab has been removed and its functionality has been replaced by plugins.
  • Default platform icons in \Web\Utility\filethumbnails have been replaced, and new icons have been added for file extensions ascx, aspx, config, dll, dot, dotx, htm, html, mpp, pot, potx, ps1, sql, vsd, xlt, and xml.
  • You can define whether or not a widget has a header (title) in the GUI instead of having to modify the web.config.
  • The platform no longer supports Search Meta Description and Meta Keywords fields in general site settings.
  • If you set Receive emails or Send notifications to no for a user in Control Panel, the user will be notified with a dialog box that emails (or notifications) are not enabled if he/she attempts to subscribe to a blog, blog post, forum, forum thread, or wiki page.
  • When a registered user uploads a file to a moderated media gallery, he/she is notified if that the gallery is moderated.
  • You can enable a widget for dashboard, group, blog, and sitewide themes using check boxes in the Manage Widgets tab in this release. The Enable/Disable Widgets tab functionality is still present in the release.
  • HTML scrubbing is no longer allowed to be turned off in the CSModules. If you enter HTML into comments, it's stripped out.
  • The enhanced text editor utilizes Undo and Redo buttons in the GUI. (But the Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y keyboard shortcuts still work.)
  • The profile fields for birthdate, gender, public email, website, location now can't be deleted or changed by admins (thus prevented from breaking the site).
  • The Exceptions Report page now shows the server where the exception occurred.
  • The parent forum used to be an optional property listed in Control Panel Dashboard > System Administration > Forum Administration > Forums and Groups > Create New Forum > Advanced. This option has been removed.
  • The blog Manage > Files tab has been removed.
  • The Video tab has been removed from Control Panel > My blogs > Write > Write a blog post. You should just use the Insert Video button in the enhanced text editor to add a video.
  • The "Activity Message Types to Log" section of the Advanced Options tab in previous releases, containing options to enable application, friendship, status message, and group activity notifications, has been removed. These notifications are enabled by default.

New pages

The following pages were added in this release:

  • User Mentions (in the Site Theme)
  • User Likes (in the Site Theme)
  • Content Abuse Appeal (in the Site Theme)
  • Content Appeal Queue (in the Site Theme)
  • Common OAuth Authorize (in the Site Theme)
  • Group Mentions (in the Group Theme)

New widgets

    The follow widgets have been added in this release. "Default theme" indicates the widget as furnished out-of-the-box with no theme customizations applied. "Enterprise theme" indicates that theme-specific customizations have been made to this version of the widget. Most widgets in the Enterprise theme use the Enterprise theme version.

    The Enterprise theme contains seven widgets that are not present in the "Fiji" theme. These widgets are included in the documentation.

    You can find information about configuring and using these widgets in the Customization Guide.

    Changed widgets

    • The Forum - Thread List widget supports sorting by the content quality score (in simple view only), filtering out Q&A and/or discussion threads, and filtering by built-in query types (simple view only).
    • The Site - User Navigation widget has @mentions support for users and groups.
    • The User Profile widget has @mentions support.
    • In the Group - Membership List widget, you can change the member's status in the drop-down instead of having to edit the member and click Save.
    • The Group - Application Navigation widget has an  @mentions support tab.
    • The Google Gadget widget has been removed from the platform but is placed in the Telligent Marketplace.

    Discontinued widgets

    The Activity Message List is not offered in this release. Activity is now reported by the new Activity Story Stream widget. The Google Gadget widget is removed from the platform but is available via the Telligent Marketplace.

    *Note that new versions of the Enterprise theme are made available periodically on the Telligent Marketplace.