Welcome to the new DevNet!

[cvonrosp]

For the last few months, we've been busy on a secret project. Now we get to show it to you!

When we launched DevNet site a little over a year ago, we know it was full of really great content, but that it wasn't always as easy to find as it should be. We hear from many of you that if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for we didn't do a great job of helping you find what you need. We have this great community where everyone can get together and ask questions and help each other with solutions -- and yet many of you don't even know it exists because we didn't make it easy to find.

We heard your feedback loud and clear and knew we needed to get better. We've had a team working the last few months on a complete re-design of the DevNet site. The goals were simple: make the site much easier to navigate; create a lot more content for people trying to understand and start working with our products and technologies; for people who know what they need to do but aren't sure how to do it, find ways to help them get connected with the technologies they need; and we wanted to make the site much more about the members and the community who use these technologies and make great things with them.

The new site has a much cleaner look and we've put a lot of work into simplifying the navigation and interface to make finding things easier. We've tried to make this site more about you and less about the technology, so that you can more easily use the technology to get your jobs done faster and easier.

We have created a Dev Center for each of our technology groups such as IoT, Cloud, and Networking.  The Dev Center brings together all of the important Quick Start Code samples, documents, events, news, videos, and APIs for your technology area.    You can access the Dev Centers directly with short urls like:

• developer.cisco.com/iot
• developer.cisco.com/networking
• developer.cisco.com/cloud
• developer.cisco.com/data-center
• developer.cisco.com/collaboration
• developer.cisco.com/security

If you haven't been by the DevNet site recently, stop by and check out the changes.

Please tell us what you think by visiting our forums or by dropping us an email at cvonrosp@cisco.com. We'd love to hear if you like the update, and we'd especially want to hear what we can improve to make it even better into the future.

Chuq Von Rospach, Community Manager

Cisco DevNet

[stephan.steiner]

Now you just need to get the sso issue sorted, and then perhaps look at the navigation. In the collaboration area, every space seems to work differently. Some mostly use wikis, other traditional homepages, some link to current and older apis, some only the current, etc. I think the navigation, at least in one space, should be consistent.

For instance, compare AXL with Unity Connection. If you go to CUPI from Unity Connection, you're in a different world altogether. In the CUPI wiki, there's "Other CUPI Resources", which links to non existing content (that seems to happen quite often).

[cvonrosp]

Thanks, Stephan -- I'll pass that along to the team.

[amwhaley]

Stephan -

Thanks for the comments!

We are definitely working on a plan for those two issues, and it's helpful to know that we have the same concerns at the top of our list and your list.

Thanks again!

Amanda Whaley

[stephan.steiner]

Any ETA on when this is fixed? Most forums never ask you for credentials if you leave the cooking - but this community makes you log in every time you open the browser, plus it often messes up even while you're active, forcing you to log in again and then redirecting to anywhere but where you left off.

[amwhaley]

Hi Stephan -

The SSO with forums is working today.

The behavior that I am seeing is this:

1. You can read any comments, blogs or forums without logging into the communities site.

2. If you do want to comment or post, then you do need to login.

3. If you have already logged into DevNet, and then you visit the forums, you are automatically logged into the forums.

Are you seeing a different behavior?  If so, please let me know the details and which forum you are seeing the behavior in.

Thanks!

Mandy Whaley

[stephan.steiner]

The behavior I'm seeing is this: I'm logged into devnet. I can access my tickets, update cases, everything. Then I go to the community where I'm not logged in and have to log in again.

If I keep my browser running the entire day, after a certain amount of time (I can't say how much.. I just know it happens multiple times a day), I get logged out again from the community (but remain logged into devnet). The problem may be related to the autosave... when the problems start, I often am in a forum thread, and I do get a red bar coming in from the lower end of the browser telling me something has gone wrong and I need to refresh. If I click the link to refresh, I'm taken to the login page, and upon finishing the login, I'm transfered to someplace else than I started out before going to the login page.

[cvonrosp]

Stephan, I'm seeing something similar on and off. I'll show up and then get logged back out again. I find if I refresh again I'm logged back in again and then I'm fine when that happens. Are you by any chance running Safari as a browser? It looks like hand-off between sites for the login credential may be the culprit and I'm wondering if it's Safari specific. Doing a page refresh causes those credentials to be refreshed by the community site and then it seems happy with itself again...

[stephan.steiner]

I'm mostly using Chrome, some times IE as well. Just now when I wanted to post, I had another issue: I clicked on the link in my mail Client, which opened this page on my Default browser (IE11). To press the reply button I needed to log in, so I entered my credentials, and was redirected to this page, but the reply link still stated "Login required". When I pressed it, it jumped to the Login page, and was redirected here (without having to enter a Login). In the meantime I had fired up Chrome so I'm not sure if that has something to do with it. In fact I also have the same thread open in Chrome - obviously it wasn't logged in, but when I pressed the reply link, it jumped pages and went right back, me now being logged in. That's not Standard behavior.. but maybe you could also look at interactions when you have multiple Browsers.

[stephan.steiner]

Voila, it just happend. So I was using the communities in IE for the past two hours, and then I switched to Chrome (that has been open since I started working this morning), and I clicked on the notification bullet on top (the one you get if you have notifications, e.g. because somebody responsed to one on your posts), and instead of showing a lit of notifications with clickable links the dreaded red bar http://snag.gy/3C8L8.jpg

You then need to refresh the page, which shows you as logged out. And if you try to post something, you are taken to the login page, and right back to the posting page.

This shouldn't happen. Unless you get rid of the cooking, logins should be preserved - but I suspect the underlying reason is how sessions are handled on cisco.com - they do not preserve your login status either. The only .cisco.com page I know of is developer.cisco.com that doesn't make you log in again after a certain timeout.

[stephan.steiner]

Here's another example.. this time no multi-browser history. I just did send a response to one of my tickets on developer.cisco.com then wanted to post a  message, and this happened http://snag.gy/XqCxr.jpg. The only way to "fix" it was to refresh, which showed you as logout, then press the post link (that now indicated it required login) again, which got me back to logged in state and ready for posting (but obviously what I had written was gone..).

How hard can it be for a forum to not time out sessions? I've ran my own forum for over a decade and that feature was working properly when I started it in 2000. It's a forum.. not online banking.

[Lisandro Quinteros]

In my case some time when I try to post anything and click submit the page refresh but insted of publishing the message / comment I am getting back to the screen were I am writting the message and had to click submit for a second time to send the message.. No red alert appear to me..

Only happens few times.