It Takes a Village: Announcing The New Okta Community

Almost nine months ago, we built and launched the Okta Help Center. An initiative many months in the making, the Okta Help Center introduced a central destination for all things Okta service and support within the Okta Community. It created one central location for our customers – many of whom had already been active since 2013 – to troubleshoot and learn from peers.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our champion users regularly share best practices through our Community Member Spotlight, and other customers find answers to questions they didn’t even know they had. Our product team is also easily accessible via the Okta Help Center, so users can ask for documentation straight from the source and get the answers they need, right when they need them. At the same time, this constant peer-to-peer interaction, learning and customer feedback made us realize that we could amp up the functionality and experience to make this resource even more powerful for our customers.

That’s why today we’re unveiling the new Okta Community. Thanks to the thoughtful, continued feedback from hundreds of our power users, we’ve completely redesigned the site to create an even better experience for our customers.

Here are a few of the new features you’ll see in the Okta Community – starting today:

• Help Center Integrations: We’ve added new Help Center capabilities to the Okta Community to provide customers with federated search across multiple technical documentation sources, our website and both developer and community knowledge bases. Additionally, administrators can now specify where support teams should contact them and create a "case team,” which provides broader visibility into the status of a particular case for an entire internal team.
• Personalized Recommendations: The Okta Community recognizes your identity and has a complete understanding of your relationship with Okta and the specifics of customer deployment. That means we now offer recommendations for specific types of content, conversations and experts that can provide relevant information based on your work with Okta. Customers can spend time fixing problems instead of scrolling through conversation threads that aren’t necessarily helpful to their specific query.
• Improved User Champion Area: In our new and improved User Champion Area, it’s now easier than ever to post answers to questions, access discussion groups and perform focused searches within discussion groups. User champions, who we recognize in our Top Contributors Area, can now more easily publish their own blog posts across a range of topics, including include Office 365, provisioning, SAML setup and dynamic group setup.
• A User-Centric IT Mindset: We’re big believers in a “people first, technology second” mindset when it comes to software development – and our community isn’t any different. With the new Okta Community, we’re continuing to put our customers front and center. This takes shape in the ability for customers to easily find information across all support areas, like documentation and training resources, from one central place. And at the backend, a reduction in the number of help tickets allows our product team to answer inquiries more quickly.

This newest batch of enhancements provides our customers an even better experience on the Okta Community – not only so they can access documentation and personalized assistance with speed, but more importantly, so they have the tools to help their organizations fulfill their missions. The best part is that as more customers contribute to the Okta Community and increase the quality and breadth of the content, the more valuable it becomes to everyone.

If you haven’t already, head over to the Okta Community within your admin page to check it out. (To see all the new features in action, watch the video below.)

And if you have suggestions on how to make it even better, shoot me a note at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.