Tip # 3,905: How the heck do i ADD a post???

Ok, this is a good one. I had hoped that no one would ask and I could continue to be the only person who knew how to add postings to the site...i mean if EVERYONE could post then my postings would get lost!! Oh Well...

Seriously, it is a little confusing. If you notice…on the HOME page for every Group (Service… Inventory…Sales…GL/Finance/Pres…Accounting….System Administrators….3rd Party Integration) there is a button “Join Group”…you must Join each group that you want to actively participate in. Joining the group allows you to Add Postings and Comment on other users postings. The “Join” may seem redundant, but the site functionality allows each user to select areas of interest and to see who else in the Community is participating in a particulare Group…i.e. easy to see others who are interested System Administration issues.

You will see Expansion on this group soon…for example we will be adding Groups for industry types (POS, Banking, IT, etc). This allows community members to discuss industry specific topics that are not e-automate usage specific (how to) questions, but discussions geared toward challenges specific to that particular industry (how are you tracking software options installed on customers equipment??). While the vast majority of e-automate users are in a click based busines (Copiers/MFP/Printers), we are seeing growth of businesses using e-automate that are not click based…therefore the need to have some level of segregation by industry. We also have the feature set to create Private Groups within our community that may be for interactions based upon a particular 3rd party vendor…or manufacturer, where it would not be appropriate for general consumption of the overall community, for example DGI is running a Pilot program for about 10 companies right now on a new set of products&services they hope to offer to everyone in the next 6-8 months. But they needed to pilot it with a smaller group to ork out all the details and make sure they have a viable toolset. Therefore we have setup a private group for DGI to and the pilot group members to interact on an evolving offering that will go thru some changes and teaks before DGI rolls it out to the entire community.

As our users group expands, we foresee more “sub-groups” might need to be formed/disbanded as the needs arise. So if you identify a need that justifies a separate discussion thread for a unique sub-set of our community members, please don’t hesitate to approach the executive team and let’s discuss if an additional segregation makes sense and we’ll accomadate where it makes sense. We just don’t want to end up with a community so broken up that we lose the leverage sharing use/best practices of the main e-automate product that is common across all industries!

Thanks

Mike