The software that runs this community was upgraded yesterday. This gives a few new opportunities to get the most out of the community experience here.
The "My View" page (next to the home icon in the nav bar) is a great resource to use as your primary view on the community. It is customizable with tiles that give you shortcut views to different kinds of information.
To edit your view, click the "Edit page" link at the upper right. This allows you to edit the page which has a lot of "tile" areas. It's similar to editing home pages in ServiceNow. Click on a "Add a tile" link and you can choose which type of content to populate that area. You can also reorder them by dragging, or move up and down one with the icons in the upper right of each tile. If that tile has some specific configuration (like choosing categories or tags), you can access that with the gear icon in the upper right.
Central section tiles that you can use to optimize your experience are the "Frequently viewed" and "Recently viewed" tiles. You can configure them to show content, people and/or places in each of them. On creation of the tile or by clicking the gear icon, you will presented with a set of check boxes to choose which of the three the tile will display (and you need at least one checked.)
The sidebar tiles have some more choices available than the central tiles. You can set up tiles for "Tagged Content". This allows you to specify a comma separated set of tags that you are interested in, and see the most recent posts with that tag. For example, "geneva" would be a great tag to follow now, along with others of relevance to your current work. The most popular tags right now are "catalog", "notifications", "script", "cms" and "workflow". This also implies that when you are posting discussions and questions, tagging them well is a good idea as it might help surface your question to people interested in following the topic. It is possible to see the tag cloud of the top 200 most commonly used tags here.
Some of these tiles are automatically populate, like the "Frequently viewed", "Trending" and "Tagged content." Some of these tiles consist of static content you manage yourself. You can do this with the "Key Content and Places" tile. It allows you keep a scratchpad like area of topics you are following currently, as well as places (categories) you frequently read. Similar to this is the "Helpful Links" tile, which does much the same thing but with arbitrary links around the web. You can have a shortcut to HI, the Wiki or the API explorer right there in your sidebar on the community. By configuring it with your common destinations, you can make the "My View" of the community act as your central launching pad for your ServiceNow experience.
There is a lot of great functionality and a lot to learn in this new release of the community software. Here's hoping it enhances your experience in the developer community. If you have any tricks or configurations that are making your life better, please leave them in the comments.
