Totara Social Open Discussions

Totara Social 2.0 features and release date

Hi everyone!

We are pleased to announce Totara Social 2.0 will be released during the week of October 5th, 2015.

This release will include:

Totara Connect authentication plugin
Integration with Social Networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook
Fully re-written access control system
Integrated SVG Graph library for site statistics
New datepicker with improved localisation support
plus other minor improvements

We will provide additional information and feature details during the build up to this new release.

Totara Social team

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Hi all,

Just a quick update with more Social 2.0 feature details and screenshots.

Major features

Social networks integration

Users will be able share their files, questions, pages, and other items on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Items can be shared either from Activity Stream (see image below) or from the item page itself.

We added a site and a user setting to enable social networks sharing. Each item can also explicitly allow/prohibit such sharing.

New access control system

Rewrote the way permissions work in Totara Social to use an acyclic directed graph to build hierarchy of content and check access to the items.

Based on our performance tests this system is considerably faster than permission checks in Totara Social 1.0 series.

This major code refactoring will also allow us to add collections of pages and reuse multiple pages in the same collection.

Totara Connect Auth Plugin

Totara Connect will provide a way to link multiple Totara LMS and Totara Social instances so that they can be used together in a seamless way.

An administrator will be able to configure this connection in the way that works best for their organisation.

Initial functionality will focus on single-sign-on between the systems and user and group syncing. In the future, the functionality will be extended to allow syncing of other data.

Minor improvements

Switch to jQuery datepicker: We switched to jQuery UI Datepicker plugin for date selection in to-do lists and administration reports. This allows us to improve internationalisation support as datepicker can now be localised through language strings.

Replace PEAR Graph library with SVGGraph for generating site stats and page layouts preview: We have removed PEAR Graph library and replaced it with SVGGraph. This improvements allows us to generate site/tenant statistics graphs as well as previews of custom page layouts on the fly without creating and storing images on a server.

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Hi,

I would like to know where the options to enable individual chat and group chat options are available for users? We are using Social 2.0 and are unable to locate these options.

Any help will be much appreciated.

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Hi Sudarsan,

These options are under user settings (accessed through user menu on the top right hand side). Please see the screenshot.

You can also check that the Tenant chat settings are enabled if a user is a member of a tenant. Tenant chat options are available when editing tenants in "Plugin settings" section of the page.

Yuliya

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Hi Yuliya,

Thank you for the response and for the screenshot. After logging to my account, I accessed my user settings through the 'Settings' link in top right side of the page. I then accessed the Settings tab where username, password, general a/c settings are available.

However, I did not see the chat options available in this page. I have enclosed the screenshot for your reference. Is there something that I'm missing here?

Thanks.

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Hi Yuliya,

You can ignore my previous post regarding enabling the chat options. I realized that the 'Show Online Users' option was disabled.

Thanks.

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Hi Yuliya,

I have made connections with few of my peers within the Org. On accessing the chat options, I don't see the list of users who are online for chat. Please see screenshot posted.

For your information, I have checked the URL in both Firefox and Chrome. Any assistance is much appreciated.

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Hi Sudarsan,

Chat doesn't show all online users. As the message in chat windows says you need to join groups or make connections to be able to chat with people. Since users can already send an internal message to anyone on the system, we restricted chat to connections and groups only. This means that users that you don't know won't randomly spam you with their messages. If you have already sent a connection request to anyone, you still need to wait till it is accepted.

Yuliya

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Hi Yuliya,

I did notice the message in the chat window on only users who are connected with me showing up in the window. However, though 4 or 5 users have accepted my connection request and are currently logged in, they do not show up in my chat window.

Are there any other settings that needs to be enabled for chat?

Another question I had was regarding third-party plugin support. For e.g., can we add external plugins like carousel, slider, news & events. If yes, is there a way to do that?

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Hi Yuliya

the TS 2.0 update looks really good. I am most excited about the fact that I can post and image directly from my status update- I think this is new? My main query is how the notifications to other users work for this? We are running an education community for doctors. They are busy and we are competing with simple apps that allow a quick post + image and then move on. The status update with actual content feeding through to the activity stream is great. Who will get notification about a status update ? Is it only connections or can we default it to group members ? Can we relabel status update to 'quick case' in the language pack ? Will ' post an idea /question ' get the same functionality ?

regards

stephen

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Hi Stephen,

It's always good to get feedback and suggestions from someone using the system.

Adding and showing pictures in status updates was added in version 1.0.8. Status updates notifications work like in any other area: when someone posts a status update they can select who to share it with and any attached file (picture) inherits permissions of this status update. If the majority of status updates normally get shared with a specific audience, users can set default sharing in their preferences. With the default sharing, every time someone creates a new status update "Share with" field will be pre-filled with the audience from their sharing preferences. By audience I mean any combination of groups, users, tenants, etc. This "Share with" field can be edited at any time even if there is default sharing set.

Getting status update to show in activity stream is actually not up to a person sharing it. Totara Social has a very fine-grained and flexible notification settings page. Anyone can decide where they would like to get a notification about things happening in the system: activity stream (also called homestream), email, local inbox, or email digest. It all depends on how users prefer to interact with the system, someone might be more inclined to using email rather than checking their activity stream.

If you had a chance to look around the system, you might have noticed that there is a group activity stream. Users can post their status updates inside the group area and they will be automatically shared with this group by default.

As for renaming things in the system, it is done through language packs and when needed you can localise your language pack. This would be a better idea than just changing some strings in it. I couldn't find any information on how to do that on our help site, but I will make sure we add it there ASAP.

Adding attachments to questions/ideas is not implemented yet. We are working on adding filebrowser to a rich text editor and might be adding an option to embed/add images to all content types in Totara Social. I will try keep you updated on the progress of this feature. It might be a good idea to open a feature request in helpdesk to make sure that you get notified when this is implemented.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to message me if you have any more questions.

Yuliya

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