The Social View

The Social view is an alternative view of primary items that enables users to collaborate more easily. For example, an item feed enables users to quickly and easily see who has contributed information to an item. Users can also easily post status entries, notes, and attachments.

You can also configure the Social view to:

Enable users to see and contact "experts" who have worked on a item. For details, refer to Enabling the Experts Feature.
Enable users to follow an item and be notified about changes to the item based on notifications you create and select for this feature. For details, refer to Enabling the "Follow" Feature.
Disable the Social view. For details, refer to Disabling the Social View.

The Social view is enabled by default and can be opened by clicking the clicking the Social button on any primary item.

Note: The Social view is not available for users with Occasional User or External User product access.

Social View Application Dependencies

In general, the Social view provides an alternate view of the traditional Details view of a primary item. This section describes the relationships between application elements and the Social view.

Social View Updates
All data added to an item is available in the appropriate areas of the Social and Item Details views. For example, if a note is added to the Social view, users with appropriate privileges can see the note in the Item Details view.
Privileges
Privileges govern a user's ability to see items in the Social view. For example, users who do not have privileges to see change history for an item will not see change history entries in the Item Log.
Journal Log
The Journal Log is based on Text fields set as Journal fields and an Update transition. The first enabled update transition named "Update" is used to add entries. If such a transition does not exist, the Journal Log uses the first transition of the type "update." If the transition requires any input from users, such as required fields or notes, the Journal log is not available.

By default, the first Journal field found is used in the log, but users can select other Journal fields from the drop-down list.

Users cannot delete Journal Log entries for Journal fields set as "append only."

Note: If there are no Journal fields in your application, the Journal Log contains only the note, file, image, and link options.

Enabling the Experts Feature

The Experts feature enables users to see a list of experts based on the number and kind of similar items they worked on.

The experts are found and ranked based on the following criteria:

The title words in the item are used to search for similar items within the same project and subprojects. Similar items are found and ranked based on a weighted keyword search of the title and description within the items.
Only items that have been in the same state in the past six months are evaluated.
Deleted users are not included in the suggested expert list.
The current user is not included in the suggested expert list.

To enable the Experts feature, you must first:

Configure your database management system for full-text indexes, using the information in S138517 in the Knowledgebase at serena.com.
In SBM Composer, select the Enable Searching for Social Widget check box on the Options tab of the Table Property Editor for the application primary table, and then deploy your changes. This step must be completed for each application that will use the Experts feature.

Enabling the "Follow" Feature

Users who choose to follow an item are sent e-mail notifications based on changes to the item. You can define what it means to follow an item by creating notifications for each workflow in the system.

For example, you may want to send users an e-mail when any changes are made to an item they are following. In this case, you can create a notification with a rule like this:

"Any Item Changes"

Assign the rule to a notification so that e-mails are generated when any item changes. Once you select this notification for a workflow's Social view, users will receive an e-mail any time a change is made to the item they are following.

To enable the "follow" feature:

Note: Users are not able to follow items in a project until you have followed these steps for the workflow assigned to the project.

Create notifications related to features on the Social view.
Edit a workflow used for the notifications you created.
Select the Social View tab.
From the list, select the notifications that will be sent to followers of an item once the notification rule becomes true.
Save your changes.

Disabling the Social View

By default, the Social view is enabled for all primary items in all projects.

To disable the Social view:

From the Administrator Portal, select the Projects icon.
Select All Projects in the Process Apps/Applications pane.
In the content pane, select Base Project, and then click Details.
In the Social View section, clear the Use Social View check box.
Save your changes.