Quandora being a crowd-sourced, social knowledge sharing product, people are clearly its heart and soul. A Q&A base is only as valuable as its members are active contributors. Thus, supporting advanced user accounts creation and management, and providing dead-easy ways of authenticating, is a fundamental aspect of our product. We have dedicated most of our latest work to it, and here’s some news I’d like to share with you.
User Groups
You’ve asked for it, we did it: Quandora now supports user groups. The groups’ main advantage is that they allow assigning roles in Knowledge Bases in a centralized way. Let me explain with a use case:
Suppose you have three Knowledge Bases (KB): HR, Sales and Tech support. You want your whole company to have access to HR, since it contains useful information about HR processes that anyone may need. But you only want sales people to have access to the Sales KB: they discuss deals, accounts, globally things of a higher level of sensitivity. Last, the Tech support KB should be visible to tech people (developers, project managers, testers, consultants…) but also to sales people who need to stay in touch with the product and projects.
By using the group feature, this setup is translated as follows:
- Create the groups corresponding to your types of audiences: all_company, sales, tech_team. This is done in the administration panel – choose the “Users and Groups” tab, and click on the Manage Groups link on top of the main section of the page.
- Go to the desired KBs and assign the desired roles to the groups.
3. Next time a new employee joins your company, you don’t have to go into all the KBs and add them. All you have to do is add them into the right group, and they’ll have access to the right Knowledge Bases.
This use case is one of internal usage of Quandora. But perhaps the most common application to the groups and roles is related to using Quandora as an inter-organization tool. Indeed, for those companies who use Quandora to share with an external community (product ecosystem, partners, customers, etc), the Knowledge Bases have clearly different audiences. Usually, the company’s employees have access to them all, while the external people only have access to one or two. Creating groups (company, partners, customers…) and assigning them roles in KBs allow for an easy management of this use case.
You get the idea: combining groups and roles allows to finely define the level of access of your users, and to easily maintain it moving forward.
Bulk create users
If you’re either starting with Quandora, or you need to add a new team to the system, you may find handy the new feature of bulk creating users. It basically allows you to enter a list of email addresses to create user accounts from. This list can be specified manually, but also, you can put it together from a CSV or Excel file, and copy paste it in Quandora.
Don’t worry if some of the users already exists, Quandora will skip them and let you know about it.
SAML2 support
Is your company using a SAML2-compliant identity manager product? (Okta, SecureAuth, OneLogin…) Now you can enable your users to log in to Quandora using their corporate account. You’ll need to set up a few things both in Quandora and in the account provider, but it should be pretty straightforward. And we’re here to support you if you encounter any issues.
So, what’s next?
Stay tuned for your next releases, a couple of cool features are on their way! Ever wanted to just drop an email thread from Gmail into Quandora, to be imported as a Q&A? Our system will allow you to do that automagically from your Gmail interface directly, via a bookmarklet. You’ll be able to completely configure the result of the import visually by means of drag&drop!
Also coming soon, a migration tool from OSQA. As for the email thread imports, it’s a fully configurable process that enables you to control the way your Q&A base is reconstructed starting from the existing OSQA Content.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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