Synergetic Community (Discourse)

Synergetic are also excited to announce a new community engagement platform called Discourse.

https://discourse.synergetic.net.au/

While historically enhancement requests were logged in and reviewed on a periodic basis, the release of Discourse will allow users to raise feature requests (enhancements) for all Synergetic clients to review and comment on. This will assist us in prioritising enhancements in the future based on the general consensus and support they receive from the Synergetic community. 

We are putting the development roadmap in the hands of the community and will be responsive to what our clients are wanting developed or improved.

Users are able to vote to support ideas that other users have suggested.

• The number of active votes increases as users gain reputation - at starting level users will have ability to issue 10 active votes.
• If the topic is closed or archived, the registered votes are released to the users and can be applied to other topics (but the vote count on the topic remains).
• If a topic is re-opened or unarchived, the votes are reclaimed and applied back to the users active vote count.
• If a topic reclaims the votes of a user and they go over their limit, they simply need to wait until topics are closed or archived to allow them to vote again.

The more interaction users have within the Synergetic Community the more 'trust' they are given.

User trust levels are a way of granting experienced users more rights, so that they can help maintain and moderate the community they generously contribute so much of their time toward.

Future Synergetic Discourse Integration

We fast tracked the deployment of Discourse so we could give our customers a platform that didn't previously exist in order to discuss prospective enhancements and seek peer support.

We had reviewed SSO with Discourse and Service Desk, but this wasn't an option for us as we are not using Atlassian Cloud, and while Discourse supports OAuth2, Service Desk only supports OAuth1 which are not compatible.

Unfortunately this did mean that clients would need to provision an additional set of credentials- we actually held off releasing Discourse for over a month while we battled with this decision.

However our second phase involves implementing authentication in our product suite to allow transparent access to both Discourse and Service Desk, probably by a button in the Windows and web menus.
This should allow users to have a single click through to access these additional services with no credentials required.