New Tech Zone feature – email updates
Hello Tech Zone users. I’d like to interrupt your day to announce a new feature that I think you’ll like, and to take the opportunity to recap a few of the site features we’ve recently released that you may have missed.
I strongly encourage you to log in to the site. You won’t get more content, that’s always free to everyone. But you will get access to features that improve the experience. There’s no new ID’s or passwords to remember, you simply use your existing VMware ID. The same one you use to get support or download products.
Announcing Email Subscription
As of today, you can now receive a weekly email from Tech Zone summarizing the new assets you missed. We won’t spam you. We won’t sell your details. You can opt out at any time. The standard VMware email policies govern this site, and you can adjust your global settings here.
Please go to your Tech Zone User Profile / Preferences page and opt in to receive the weekly email update.
Tech Zone features you may have missed
Since Day One of this year, we’ve pushed over 200 code changes to Tech Zone. We now boast a library of over 600 fully curated, up-to-date assets designed to help you get the most for VMware’s Digital Workspace technologies.
Here’s a few of the site features you might have missed.
RSS Feeds
We now have two RSS feeds. You can subscribe to our regular document feed that lists all new and updated assets, and you can subscribe to your favorite author.
Did you know all our authors have their own showcase pages? With the exception of our bloggers, we don’t make it easy for you to find them, but if you do stumble across one, you can now directly subscribe to assets created by your favorite author. Here’s Brian’s:
Searching Video
Tech Zone’s search capabilities have now become more powerful. Here’s my favorite example: Go to the search bar at the top of this page and search for ‘warehouse’. As you can see from the screenshot below, the term is used just once in our new Healthcare doc. But more importantly, it is spoken by one of our Experts in a video. If you click the orange Transcription Match link, the video starts playing just a few moments before the word is uttered at timestamp 0:54. Very useful!
Talk to us
We have thousands of signed up users, and tens of thousands of monthly visitors. We want to hear from you! We’re experimenting with new ways to talk with you, but in the meanwhile, we’ve got 3 methods already built into Tech Zone. There’s the Comments section at the end of the blogs. There’s the big green link in the footer of every page. And most—not all, but most—of our assets have what we call the ‘in-doc action bar’. This bar lets you rate, share, pin, and comment on the asset.
Plus, you can always email us at euc_tech_content_feedback@vmware.com
My Tech Zone
Have you noticed the My Tech Zone section on the home page? Once you’re logged in, we track what you like to view, what you search for, and what social shares you like to push. This helps us provide you with a customized experience. We don’t share this information with anyone but you.
One such experience is that on your Profile page, you’ll find your browsing history. Many people tell me that being able to replay searches is one of the most useful features on the site. Others tell me that being able to pin most-used assets to the home page is the most useful.
But I disagree. I hate being the only one in a meeting that hasn’t read a pertinent document. That’s where the My Company tab comes in. Assuming you and everyone in your team sets their MyVMware profile to have the same company name, you’ll be able to see what everyone is reading and watching. Very useful for those of us who don’t like to be left out!
Special filters on product pages
Obviously, you’ve seen all the cool filters you get when you search, but have you noticed there are filters on the product pages too? They’re unique to the page. You can’t find them anywhere else on the site. They make finding some use-case-specific documents much easier. Try them out!
Unique Table of Content URLs
I say unique because I can’t find another site that does this. First, I think it’s very user-friendly that our documents are all on one long page. It makes searching and reading so much easier than all the clicking required by other sites. On the other hand, when a document is on many separate pages, it does make it easier to share with your colleagues.
We solved that problem, though. Did you notice as you scroll through one of our long documents, not only does the Table of Contents follow you, but we update the browser’s URL bar too? That makes it easy to grab the URL of a specific section and shoot it out to your colleagues.
I’ve got plenty more new features to tell you about, but I’ll save those for another day. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a Tech Zone user!
Andy.