I’m happy to announce the launch of the new Digital Workspace community on VMTN! The new Digital Workspace community is your new home for product forums and engagement with your peers.

Over the past year we’ve been working behind the scenes in partnership with the VMTN team to migrate forums from the previous platform, reorganize and consolidate forums, and launch new features for the community. After a year of planning and execution, the new community is now live!

Let me tell you more about four new features of the Digital Workspace community.

Enhanced Platform

Forums have been moved to a completely different back-end platform. As soon as you go to  https://communities.vmware.com/, you’ll notice a few new things:

• Much faster performance
• Simplified navigation structure
• Integrated search suggestions as you type a new question
• New community leadership structure

You can read more about the new platform here. We’re still getting up to speed on how to take advantage of the new features of the platform, so stay tuned on that front.

Simplified Digital Workspace Forums Structure

For the launch of the new platform, our aim was to simplify our forums structure dramatically. Previously, we had forums spread all across VMTN, with no connectivity between them. For example, if you were in the Dynamic Environment Manager forum, there was no easy way to get to the Horizon Desktops and Apps forum. We wanted to change that by building connective tissue across all of our Digital Workspace forums.

This starts by having a single home for the forums for all end-user computing products and technologies under the Digital Workspace community. We’ve then created two parent forums for all end-user computing products, Workspace ONE and Horizon.

The great news with this new platform is that it enables us to have a clean parent/child structure. That means that conversations from any child forums, like App Volumes for example, will bubble-up to the topline Horizon parent forum.

New Digital Workspace Community

You’ll notice that the forums have new community features that allow you to JOIN a particular community. Over time, this will open up new ways to communicate with all of you. Our objective is to use the community membership features of the new platform to share key technical resources, raise awareness of events, and present opportunities to engage with the community.

You can JOIN at multiple levels. You can join the Digital Workspace Community or the product-based communities for Workspace ONE or Horizon. We encourage you to join one or all three!

Greater Expert Presence on Forums

Back in October 2019, we launched a survey to allow you to give us feedback on our product forums. What was the #1 piece of feedback? You wanted a greater presence on the forums from VMware employees and community experts.

Since then, we’ve issued a call to action internally and across our expert communities to engage more broadly with the community across our forums. We hope that you’ve seen the difference. VMware experts such as Chris Halstead, Josue Negron, and Arnout Grootveld (the Dynamic Environment Manager mastermind that goes by DEMdev on our forums), and more, are helping you all deepen your understanding of our products.

In addition, we have super active community experts that you can find on our Top Kudoed community authors here.  

So, What’s Next?

We have many more features that we’re testing in the lab now. Each of these is intended to drive greater community engagement, expert recognition, and content sharing. A few we will share more about soon are new Digital Workspace badges, community leadership opportunities, and even more community integration with Tech Zone. So stay tuned on that front!

In the meantime, we invite you to join the community! Ask a question, answer a question, or just browse for a topic of interest to you. If you have any feedback, reach out to me at fontanezj@vmware.com.