Community update: little adjustments, here and there

[CarolineS]

Hi ya'll!

We've just launched some small adjustments to the community - here's the list for those of you who are interested.

• New favicon! Now you'll be able to tell your community tab from your Meraki Dashboard tab and your Meraki Documentation tab:
• Updated font. We're now using the Meraki font, Proxima Nova.  
  
  
• New 404 page. Our design team created a fun new 404 (page not found) page. Check it out here: http://community.meraki.com/404 (@MRCUR, you'll be amused to learn that we have an addition to our "subtle space theme" 🚀 🛰)
  
  
• Site redirect. To support some future community projects, community.meraki.com now redirects to https://community.meraki.com/t5/Meraki-Community/ct-p/meraki.
  
  
• Improved navigation. The "hamburger" menu in the upper left now appears in the desktop version of the site (as well as the mobile version), making it easier to navigate between boards. (Except, erm, currently that menu isn't showing boards - whoops! Looking into that... - FIXED!)
  
  
• Related content. We're now displaying "Related Content" on each thread page. I'm curious to see how "Related" this content will actually be—let us know if you find it useful (vs annoying / distracting)!
  
  
• Visual separation for signatures. We've added a thin dividing line between the content of a topic / reply and the author's signature. You may wish to double-check how your signature looks with this line in place.

We hope these small tweaks make your experience here just a bit more pleasant. 

What other interface adjustments do you wish we'd make to make the community easier for you to use? (There just may be some swag in store for anyone who comments on this blog post with their thoughts! 😀)

P.S. Happy 🥧 / π day!! I'm off to eat some of the former.

[jared_f]

 I am really happy with the new font! Much easier to read in my opinion. 

Thanks for keeping us posted! Great improvements.

[MRCUR]

I am all for more space themes! Maybe the design team can get a @MerakiDave astronaut going!?

I do like the related content in the threads, but it makes the individual posts pretty narrow. On a 1080p monitor there's quite a lot of white space on both sides. 

[CarolineS]

@MRCUR - love the idea of a @MerakiDave astronaut! 👨‍🚀 (wow, I am extremely happy to find an astronaut emoji!)

As far as the related content - when you say that the individual posts are pretty narrow, do you mean the posts within the Related Content module on the right, or the main content in the wide column? I'm guessing you mean the Related Content module has too much white space on both sides (I agree!), but I figured I'd confirm.

🚀 👽 ⭐️ 🛰 🌍 (SO. MANY. SPACE. EMOJIS.)

[ZDonaldson]

I would much prefer to see feature requests made here in the forums where we can see how many people are requesting them, rather than through the "make a wish" button

I would think it would be easy to change the button on the dashboard to link to the community

[PhilipDAth]

 I'm still waiting for the neural plug in so I don't have to read at all.

[MerakiDave]

@ZDonaldson that's a solid wish, but I think that could be a huge lift, I like your thinking but not sure if that would happen anytime soon.  Although the process of making a wish and clicking the submit button might give the impression it's sending your wish packets with DSCP 46 straight to the bit bucket, I assure you that wishes do matter. 🙂  Here's some info from a post I made a while back...

First, every wish is recorded in the system and has a unique wish ID, and like you might expect from any flex table in Dashboard, the Meraki product teams can see the entire wish list, search and sort for any wish right down to who made the wish, date/time, and what page in Dashboard you made the wish from.  

Since Meraki has grown tremendously the last couple years (now a $2B business unit in Cisco, over 1.4 million active Meraki networks and counting) there are now dozens to hundreds of wishes every week.  While there actually is a monitor in the product team area with Dashboard wishes popping up in real time, that's more for show.  There is not (at least not anymore) some poor soul who has the job of reading, categorizing and prioritizing every wish.  

The make-a-wish system has been improved to examine the metadata of all wishes and intelligently look at wish data in aggregate to help automate the process.  This way specific product teams can get more meaningful wish lists that are already properly categorized by product and feature and keywords and how frequently the same thing is being wished for.

Wishes do matter and are sometimes granted!  Examples: 1. MS: When looking at an individual switch port's Dashboard page, at the bottom where you can see bcast, mcast, CRCs, fragment counters over the last 5/15/60 minutes or full day... You now have the ability to zero the counters and start from that instant by selecting "with live data" which is a feature that was born out of customer wishes.  2. MR: On the RF tab, instead of just having "with live data" which was always there, you can now select hour/day/week/month and do retrospective wireless troubleshooting to see how many clients were associated, radio utilizations, and interference levels.  3. MV: Camera admins can now select a maximum retention period, per camera, so you can force any camera to discard footage after X number of days.  4. MX: Load monitoring, as described here https://documentation.meraki.com/MX-Z/Monitoring_and_Reporting/Load_Monitoring was prioritized by customer wishes.

As a reminder for others who stumble across this post, it's important to make your wishes from the Dashboard page where it is relevant, because that is part of the wish data, and helps categorize wishes properly.  This is also why wishes (and this Meraki community) are not for formal feature requests or new product requests.  Direct those (and their use cases) through your Meraki sales teams. 

[MRCUR]

@CarolineS Both actually! The individual posts in a thread are quite narrow now, especially because of the "Tags" space within them. 

[CarolineS]

Thanks, @MRCUR! I’ve been trying to figure out how to move the tags (or maybe just remove them since we don’t seem to use them much) and I’ll get the padding fixed on the right rail.

[ZDonaldson]

@MerakiDaveThanks for the explanation.  I've been using the Wish button when I find features that are missing when I compare the Meraki MX to other next-gen security products, including "features" that I would consider to be must-haves for any full-featured security product. 

Are you saying these should be going through the sales team to add more urgency than the wish button might provide?

My thinking behind using the community for it was to give some sort of public view as to how many folks are requesting the same things that I am.  Or maybe someone suggests something that I wouldn't even think on my own of but sounds great and I could add my own vote for that feature after seeing it posted.

Maybe this community isn't the best place for technical reasons, but some sort of public view would be awesome in my opinion.

[MRCUR]

@ZDonaldson Your sales team can access formal feature requests, which are separate from wishes. 

[CarolineS]

Just added one additional change that I accidentally left off the original list - we added a dividing line between the content of the post and the author's signature. It just looks better that way!

[MRCUR]

@CarolineS The dividing line is my 2nd favorite change (next to the spaceship of course!). No more confusion about what's a signature and what's part of the post. 

[MerakiDave]

@ZDonaldson Yes @MRCUR is correct, make a wish is not for feature requests, although it's fine to strike up conversation regarding wishes in the Community, the best way is to always discuss feature requests with your Cisco Meraki SE.  We can access our internal systems to see if an FR might already exist, and tag your account or opportunity to specific feature requests, and we can also create net-new feature requests, but will typically ask for the specific need, shortcoming, and/or use case. 

That process also provides us the info we need to research back-end features/options that might already exist, but are much less common and might not appear in Dashboard by default, in order to keep Dashboard less cluttered and intuitive for the masses.  So it's also worth checking with Meraki Support to discuss a specific feature, which might be exactly what you need, but could be more of a niche feature that isn't available by default, and can simply be turned on for you. 

I know what you might be thinking, why not show every option along with information bubbles and documentation, and I get that, but there's an also effort to keep Dashboard uncluttered, especially if only a small percentage of worldwide users need a niche feature. 

Bottom line is always discuss with your Cisco Meraki team and/or Meraki Support.

[Mr_IT_Guy]

Loving all the new changes. The favicon is actually probably my favorite! I don't know how many times I've closed out the community page thinking I was closing out a Meraki tab I'm not using anymore

[ZDonaldson]

@MerakiDaveThanks for the info.  I reached out to my Meraki sales contact, but his response was to use the wish button, so it seems like we aren't all on the same page with this.

Also, Since rolling out my MX I have contacted support regarding 5 different functions. they are such obvious and common things that I assumed I was just not finding them in the dashboard.  Support responded to all 5 saying that those features/functions didn't exist.

So, I'll continue to use the wish button, my sales contact, and these forums just to be thorough.

[MerakiDave]

Understood.  I'd follow up with your Meraki sales SE, let them know the case number from when you called in, if there was one, and get them the laundry list of missing features, they will be able to check which ones might already have a back-end feature that could be enabled for you, which ones might already have a feature request or possibly in development, and which ones are just not there yet and could create an appropriate FR.

[BlakeRichardson]

The dividing line is awesome, the amount of times I would post and then have to edit adding in carrage returns to add some seperation. 

Meraki just keeps on giving!

[BlakeRichardson]

I just had a brainwave. Could we have a white on black setting for those of us who prefer less bright light. 

[CarolineS]

@BlakeRichardson -

The dividing line is awesome, the amount of times I would post and then have to edit adding in carrage returns to add some seperation.

Meraki just keeps on giving!

Sometimes little things make a big difference, eh?

I just had a brainwave. Could we have a white on black setting for those of us who prefer less bright light. 

Great idea!  I'll discuss with the design team and our community platform vendor.

Cheers! 

[CarolineS]

@MRCUR - your wish is our command! Check out the new layout of the thread pages! (tags moved below the content instead of to the right, less white space between the main column & the right column). Here's an example (on my favorite thread of all time): https://community.meraki.com/t5/Off-the-Stack/Where-in-the-world-has-your-Meraki-swag-been/m-p/310

[MRCUR]

@CarolineS Much better! Thank you and your gnomes (or are they astronauts!?) for the update!