Documents - Questions and Feedback

[LiliMcDonald]

Do you have questions about the new documents functionality? First, we recommend reading the following topic:

• Using Documents in the NI Community.

If you're wondering what has changed with the migration, a summary can be found in the post here: Changes to Community Functionality

• Documents do not exist within user groups. Documents will be found in their respective areas such as Example Programs, Reference Designs, Sample Exercises, etc.
• For documents that previously existed within a user group, the documents will be migrated over and converted to topics within the user group.
• For documents that were not located within groups and that were not categorized, the documents will be moved them to an "Additional Documents" category within the community.
• There will be templates available to chose from when creating a new document.
• Saved drafts for documents are visible to any community user within the Documents Dashboard.
• Published documents can be edited and collaborated on by any community user.
  • There are options to restrict edits (anyone can edit but only the author can publish changes) or block edits (only the author can edit and publish changes) on documents.
• Some categories will require special permissions for creating or editing documents.
• Documents can have pre-defined labels added to act as a type of sub-categorization.
• Tags can be added after a document has been published.
• Documents being migrated over will display the original publish date but not the last edited date.
  • The last edited date will update once a document is edited post-migration.
• The version history available for a document will start with the most recently published version. Versions from before the migration are no longer be available.
• Personal documents and drafts were not migrated over.

You may also want to check the Known Issues with Migration list if you suspect you have encountered a bug.

If your question is not covered above, or if you have any feedback to provide, please post below.

[RobertoBozzolo]

A few questions come to my mind at a first glance of the new community site:

• It seems to me that Code exchange lists only NI-contributed documents, while all user created documents are listed in More Documents >> Community Documents with no division. Former listing of documents in the user groups at least permitted to someway categorize documents
• There seems to be missing an advanced search for documents: if you are planning to add it in the (near ?) future, be sure to add an option to select the software refers to
• I cannot search for documents created by a specific user (another option to add to the advanced search)
• Will it be possible to move user documents from More Documents to Code Exchange?
• I cannot see any way to edit a document: no "Edit" button is present nor an option in Document Options menu

As an additional comment, after grouping all content in the Community area, it seems to me that a box should be added to user profile listing documents contrinuted by the user.

[RobertoBozzolo]

Additional comments.

"Documents do not exist within user groups": this sentence needs to be clarified a little, at least adding "documents may exist within product group". As a side note to this, placing Product groups below User Groups category is misleading!

"Published documents can be edited and collaborated on by any community user": if this means that any user is able to edit a document even if not created by himself it seems wrong to me! I may accept that a document is edited by peers (e.g. same rank as the original poster or any other criteria you may imagine) but leaving to anyone that authority is not correct IMHO.

[RobertoBozzolo]

It seems to me that this discussion should be floated like the others referring to this last site update.

[PrimaryKey]

I have the same problem with the EDITing of documents. I cannot edit any documents I created before. What should I do?

[LiliMcDonald]

Regarding the inability to edit documents -- can you please try this again? If you are still seeing a problem, can you please link us to the document?

Also, on your user profile, you will find a component called My Document Contributions. This links to the full list of all of the documents you created or contributed to.

[RobertoBozzolo]

Regarding editing of documents now the Edit button appears both for documents in the CVI user group and for documents in Community, and even for documents I don't authored.

On the contrary, I can't find the My Document component in my user profile.

EDIT: I actually can see My Documents in your user profile but not in mine, regardless I'm logged in or not

[Hassan_Atassi]

Roberto,

Thank you for your feedback.  I manage the support content on ni.com, including examples programs, and wanted to follow up with specifically on:

• It seems to me that Code exchange lists only NI-contributed documents, while all user created documents are listed in More Documents >> Community Documents with no division. Former listing of documents in the user groups at least permitted to someway categorize documents
• Will it be possible to move user documents from More Documents to Code Exchange?

As may be aware, we recently released a new style guide and template for example programs on the NI Community. As part of this migration, we are in the process of updating all previously submitted example programs to meet these new standards.  For now, all example programs that was previously posted, but require some level of edits to meet the new guidelines are located in the Example Program Drafts area.  We have a team here at NI that is going through all the example programs in the draft area and updating the style and documentation, according to the style guide, but not updating the underlying functionality of the code. As these documents are updated over the next few months they will be moved to the Example Programs area.

Rest assured that example programs located in either place are still completely searchable and accessible via external search engines like google, ni.com, and the NI Community.  (At the moment, the migrated pages are probably still being crawled by these various search engines, so it may take some time for you to see results show up). 

In some cases, it is possible that before the migration, some documents were not accurately tagged as examples and may now show up in the Community Documents area.  If this is the case for any of your documents, please report that document to a moderator and they will work on correcting the issue. 

Also, with regards to your comment about categorization, you will notice that in the Example Programs area, all the example programs are now accurately labeled by product area.  We hope this will improve navigation and findability dramatically. Let us know what you think!

Thanks,

Hassan

[Christine317]

Hi Roberto - 

Thanks for your questions.  On the topic of advanced search, you asked: 

• "There seems to be missing an advanced search for documents: if you are planning to add it in the (near ?) future, be sure to add an option to select the software refers to"

• I cannot search for documents created by a specific user (another option to add to the advanced search)

Please note there is an advanced search link on the search results page.  On the search results page, there is also a way to filter based on the author.  

Also, regarding this comment in a later post:

• It seems to me that this discussion should be floated like the others referring to this last site update.

...we agree and have floated this discussion. 
Thanks,

Christine

Christine Egli
Section Manager
Digital Support Experience
National Instruments

[X.]

Where are "My" Documents?

I can search my own documents if:

- I remember their title (or part of it)

- then filter by authors (me).

- Hope for the best (I am missing one out of two at this time [*]).

I would suggest figuring out something less convoluted if you are expecting volunteers like me to contribute anything in the future. I personally will migrate my stuff on a personal website, as I really don't see the point of throwing good stuff in a bottomless pit, with the risk of being the victim of random "updates" or "upgrades".

[*] I found a trace of it with a search on the NI website:

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-48626

but the link redirects me to a generic landing page, as so many of my bookmarks carefully saved before the dreaded migration....