The following message was sent via e-mail to our latest group of TR Insiders. If you didn’t receive the mail (lousy spam filters), you can review it here at your leisure. If you did receive the mail, you can skip directly to Workspace testing via the link at the bottom of this post.
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Greetings TR Insiders,
If you’re receiving this mail, it means either you’re a veteran TR Insider who has been recalled to active duty (Oz, Apotheon, HAL, good to see you), or a new recruit to the ranks of TechRepublic’s most trusted and influential members. The TR Insiders have access to a private, for-your-eyes-only forum that will allow you to preview, critique, beta test, and directly shape TechRepublic’s feature development. There’s no obligation to participate, but if you do, there will be some tasty TR swag in your future (except for Maxwell Edison, who would rather work for free).
Participation involves testing Beta versions of TechRepublic features and giving us honest, helpful feedback. It also means keeping these features secret until they’re ready for their world debut. In the meantime, you can talk smack about all things TechRepublic safely within the confines of the TR Insiders forum, located here.
It’s been a while since TechRepublic has rolled out some new features and functionality for you to poke and prod, but we hope our latest effort will make it worth the wait. Our most recent creation, the TechRepublic Workspace, is currently in Beta.
The Workspace is designed to answer some of the most common requests and complaints we have received regarding a few of our new community features. “What do I do with Links?” and “Why should I update my Profile?” being some enduring classics of the genre. Workspace is where we pull it all together via four key components: Suggestions, History, Enhanced Links, and Projects.
Suggestions is a mix of TechRepublic content (including downloads, discussions, and blog posts) collected just for you based on the data expressed in your TechRepublic Profile. No longer will you need to search for TR content of interest to you. TechRepublic will find it for you.
History is a checklist of selected actions you’ve performed on TechRepublic, allowing you to backtrack and find interesting content you’ve already consumed and want to revisit.
Links is the lynchpin of the TR Workspace, allowing you to save and tag any of the Suggested or Historical content for future reference. You can now also mark selected Links as Private, preventing sensitive documents or content from being shared with the larger TechRepublic community.
Projects is where we kick it up a notch, allowing you to build a more narrowly focused version of your TechRepublic Workspace. Projects allow you to specify tags that will filter content for you. Would you like suggested content that relates only to VPN and security, rather than your entire list of Profile interests? Set it up as a Project and view only those results. You can also save content within the Projects via our Links feature. So if you find a great download that you want to mark and save for later, you can save it within your “VPN Security” Project so you can easily find and refer to it again.
We’d like to invite you to test Workspace and answer four questions for us via the TR Insiders forum:
What do you like about Workspace?
What do you hate about Workspace?
Would you use Workspace, and if so, what for?
What would you change about Workspace?
Yes, these are very specific questions, but feedback like, “I hate it,” or “I love it,” really doesn’t help us refine and enhance the product.
And speaking of enhancements, we have big plans for the future of Workspace, like including content from around the Web and providing collaboration features that allow you to use Workspace as a group.
Please take some time over the next week to check out the Workspace. Create a project or two and post to the TRI discussion about your experience. We appreciate your time and effort in helping us make TechRepublic the best it can be.
Sincerely,
The TechRepublic Community Team
(Stephen Howard-Sarin, Pete Spande, Shawn Morton, Beth Blakely, Jay Garmon, Paul Cook, and Bryan Peabody)
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You can find Workspace here:
https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5265-6257-0.html
