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Cyn.in 3.0.5 now with public content publishing

Posted by dhiraj 40 weeks 5 days ago

I'm happy to announce that Cyn.in 3.0.5 is now available for download and installation. We've fixed over 40 stories in this update, and this includes some cool new features and some UI improvements as well. :)

Release Highlights

We've been listening to our customers, partners and the Cynapse community and one of the key points we've noted is that even though Cyn.in is conceptually designed to fit completely behind a logged-in scenario, a lot of people have mentioned that it would be nice if they could publish out content to anonymous users, anyway. If you have an open-ended community with Cyn.in for your organization, then this feature could be advantageous in increasing participation and overall awareness about your objectives.

Anonymous Publishing in cyn.in with v3.0.5

So keeping the design principles of Cyn.in within mind, we have worked on making this possible in the default workflows that ship with Cyn.in. You'll now be able to set up your Cyn.in site such that you can selectively publish content to be visible to anonymous visitors (and search engine crawlers). Do note that we've kept the anonymous publishing flows a bit conservative, with the intent of having secure default settings. No content will automatically become published to anonymous, instead it must be initiated by user action. This action is intentionally restricted to the Site owner and Space editor roles.

New Features

Cyn.in 3.0.5 for the first time has out-of-box support for Publishing content to anonymous users. This is part of a redesigned workflow that provides Cyn.in site owners and Space Editors the option to publish interesting content for direct consumption by anonymous visitor. More details on how to set this up are available on the (now anonymously accessible) Cynapse community site at: http://www.cynapse.com/community/home/cyn.in-users/setup-cyn-in-for-anonymous-access
UI Changes: A new User menu is integrated into the top Adder bar. The toolbar now has all the key actions that you as a user of the system need to have. When being accessed anonymously, the entire top bar transforms to a single line message to login or register. The site logo now moved to the side bar, gets more prominence while users can focus on the top toolbar.
Google Chrome Frame support: For those users who'd prefer to use Google Chrome within their Internet Explorer, they now can. This is another attempt to fight the horrors created by Internet Explorer 6! For die hard IE fans, who face speed issues with Cyn.in, this should help.
Based on latest Plone: Cyn.in 3.0.5 is based on the latest stable release of Plone, 3.3.1 so all fixes of Plone are included.

Key Fixes

Due to a low-level problem between specifically the Webkit engine (that's Google Chrome, Safari, iPhone, Android and so on) and JQuery UI the browser was not rendering Cyn.in properly. Fixed.
The handling of #permalinks like the ones that show up in the Comments portlet was breaking Javascript on these URLs. Fixed.

The full list of fixed issues for 3.x series of Cyn.in can always be seen grouped by version, here .

You can download the new community appliance from here: http://www.cynapse.com/downloads/cynin-community-edition

To upgrade your Cyn.in installation to the latest version while retaining your current data, follow the instructions at Upgrade Cyn.in 3.x Community Appliance

Look forward to hearing your feedback!

Tags:chrome, Collaboration, cyn.in, Cyn.in v3, Enterprise 2.0, Plone3.3.1, public, publish, ui, upgrade

Views: 1,264, Comments: 2

cyn.in v2.1 is here - The most significant cyn.in release, ever!

Posted by dhiraj 1 year 39 weeks ago

The much awaited release of cyn.in - v 2.1 is finally here, I am honored to annouce it's public availability. Some of the New and Notables for this release are (click on a picture for slideshow):

Application Perspectives

Application containers of cyn.in v.2.0 gives way to Application Perspectives. Every space in cyn.in now come pre-fit with application perspectives. Manually creating applications as containers to content is required no more. Simply create or upload any kind of content (such as a wiki page or an excel sheet) within a space and the content appears in the correct perspectives. The important thing here is that all content is created within a space and not an application container. This helps users to focus on creating content and stop worrying about creating containers. This also facilitates easier interlinking and reusing of content between applications.

Main Space: The root of all content.

Spaces have been the pivotal aspect of cyn.in. Spaces help a group of users to create a secure work area within their cyn.in site and allocate explicit permissions to select users within it. Spaces are vital to most large companies with diverse teams. However, a substantial number of our customers & users felt the need for a simplified central collaboration area, that is accessible to every user of the cyn.in. This gave birth to the concept of the Main space. This is where All users of your cyn.in site can create or edit any content, without worrying about permissions or sharing rights. This makes the main space the best place for free form collaboration, and its no more necessary to create a bunch of spaces before new users start using cyn.in. Spaces should only be created when there is a need for security isolation.

All Updates - A consolidated activity stream

A new perspective called 'All Updates' has been added to all spaces. This shows all activity within a space (and from all spaces nested inside the space). This bridges content from all applications and types into a simple unified interface. A great deal of user experience enhancements have been designed for the all updates perspective, as we expect this to be the most used perspective on a daily basis.

Contextual Discussions. A whole new level

Commenting, the most used feature in cyn.in just got better. cyn.in v2.1 enables AJAX based discussions providing a live chat kind of user experience. These discussions are contained in all content types in the cyn.in. A comment posted to any content 'bubbles' the content to the top of the activity stream, pushing the content to the relevant audience. Read more about contextual discussions in this previous blog post.

The Status Log - Micro blogging for the enterprise

Get a micro blog dedicated for your team. Status logging tools like Twitter, Jaiku etc. have proved to be one of the simplest collaboration tools around, but public systems can rarely provide the context for work related collaboration. Public status messages help people to get word across to other people globally, where the context or content of the post is required to be relevant to a variety of audience. With cyn.in status logs, users can post work related information, which may not be appropriate or relevant to broadcast on a public system, specifically within the context of the business or enterprise. The status logs are tightly integrated to the activity stream and can contain threaded discussions. Status logs thus, are the easiest way to start a conversation with your team. More about the cyn.in status log in this post.

The Recycle Bin: Delete without fear!

Deleting content from an enterprise system is always a concern. Especially for businesses that need to follow compliance regulations. The new cyn.in recycle bin grabs deleted content from across the site, and allows the administrator to process the deleted content as per the compliance requirements. cyn.in rules can be applied to the recycle bin for custom automated processification of deleted content as well.

Completely revamped user interface

cyn.in has been well acclaimed for its simple yet powerful user interface. Focus on user experience and an user centric approach have been our strongest USPs, we have just taken the user interface to the next level. Based on a large number of user interviews, we have designed a new user interface from ground up, which is much less cluttered, and makes focusing on content much easier, yet providing required tools with minimum clicks.

A lot more minor improvements

v 2.0 Laid the foundation for a great collaboration tool. With v2.1 we had the opportunity to focus on a lot of small things that make a big difference, especially in terms of user experience. We have also fixed over 200 bugs and tracked over 50,000 hours of development time in this release. So go ahead, get the all new cyn.in - Its available in a free open source community edition, a supported enterprise edition, as well as cost effective on-demand packages.