Hi Mathias,

This is a great question! As you know, we enabled Totara Engage here on the Community last year. I'd be happy to chat in more detail about our experience of doing so, but here are a couple of things we thought about that might be helpful:

Permissions: Who will be able to do what? Totara Engage is designed to be quite democratic, so all users can add resources, create playlists and create workspaces. But you can of course limit that if you don't think it's appropriate. For example, we allow all Community users to create resources and playlists, but we don't allow them to create their own workspaces (so we can keep good quality conversations in a smaller number of workspaces, rather that splitting the discussions too widely).

Set up your profile card: If you use workspaces, some information is visible to other users in the workspace (on the Members tab). For organisations where privacy is important, you'd want to make sure the information you were displaying here was OK to be public.

Audiences: In Totara 16, audiences can sync with workspaces. This is a great way to create a space for an existing group of users to collaborate together (and using workspace privacy rules you can make sure no other users can join if you want to).

Roll out: Turning on a new tool like Totara Engage can be a big behavioural change and requires a strong comms plan to let people know not just what (and when), but why they would use the tool. Having some early advocates who start sharing content and engaging with others will help to demonstrate the kinds of behaviours you want to see. Similarly, you don't need to roll out Totara Engage to an entire organisation at the same time - you could trial it in smaller teams/departments to build advocates and learn lessons about what works and doesn't work for the organisational culture.

Content strategy: All resources need to be assigned a topic, and topics are set at site-level, so you'll need to think carefully about how you want content structured. Of course, users can also add their own tags to content, but getting those high-level topics right at the start will really help (you can add more later too of course). You should also think about seeding content - will you start with a blank space for users to populate (which might feel a bit scary), or populate it with pre-selected content? We regularly release content on the Community to give users a reason to return, and something new to learn. We also use the Recommended for you block to show users the most popular resources on the site, which is great to getting other users to engage with the most valuable resources.

User training: Will users need any training to use the new tool in the way you want them to? For example, we created a short video on how to create your own resources in the Community to encourage users to do so. Of course, we shared this within a resource too so users go to experience it.

Catalogue: Will you use the catalogue to display content from both Totara Learn and Totara Engage? In the Community, we use pre-filtered catalogues to provide different views of the same catalogue, such as our webinars on demand, or our Academy training to help users find what they're looking for as quickly as possible.

I'd be happy to chat in more detail if that would be helpful, but in the meantime I thought I'd also point you to some resources you might find useful. I'd highly recommend our guide to How to increase learner engagement with Totara Engage, which includes lots more practical tips on getting started with Totara Engage for the first time.

You might also be interested in some of our recent customer stories on Totara Engage, such as the Met Office, Catalyst, Cinepolis, MaibornWolff and IMEC. You can also watch recent webinars by the Met Office and Catalyst on their Totara implementations.

I hope that's helpful. I'd love to hear what other Community users have to say on this subject too!