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Symantec Connect

Case study screenshot

Symantec, founded in 1982, is one of the world's largest software companies with more than 17,500 employees in more than 40 countries.

URL

http://www.symantec.com/connect

Description

The company provides both security and storage and systems management solutions. Their customer base includes consumers, small businesses, and some of the world's largest global organizations. The company's phenomenal growth can be attributed to a combination of market acceptance and strategic acquisitions.

In early 2008, the company's Customer Experience (CX) team started crafting a roadmap designed to consolidate several of the support and pseudo-community offerings into a single, consistent, and best-of-breed community offering. The goal of this consolidation was to give Symantec customers a single point of contact where they could engage with the company's support, marketing, and product management teams. A secondary goal was to reduce the support costs associated with maintaining a collection of disparate community offerings.

In September of that year, Symantec decided to use the Drupal content management system as a foundation for their community initiative. Phase 1 of the effort (which took place over the next 6 months) involved merging the content and members from three disparate Symantec communities: 110,000 members from the "Symantec Technical Network" (STN) -- running on the Lithium platform; 10,000 members from the "Altiris Support Forums" -- running on FuseTalk; And 20,000 members of the Altiris "Juice" community -- already running on Drupal.

The name of this new online communication tool is "Symantec Connect" and -- as of this writing -- is serving up 3,500,000 page views each month to more than 215,000 registered users (and countless anonymous users). Connect is currently made up of more than 165,000 nodes and 525,000 comments. [Updated 05 Mar 2011]

List of features that exist in the new platform.

  • symantec connect forums

    Forums

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/forums

    The discussion forums are the centerpiece of the Connect community. The forum feature set allows users to post product- and support-related questions to the community. In a recent study, Symantec noted that 90% of questions posted to Connect are answered by other users on Connect.

    One of the custom features built into the Connect forums is the ability for a forum poster to mark a particular answer to his/her question as the "solution". Marking solutions in this manner make it much easier for subsequent users to quickly find answers to commonly-asked questions. Symantec terms these answered questions as "deflections" that save the company money because they don't have to be answered by a paid support employee.

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    Ideas

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/ideas

    Following the lead of other sites like Dell's Ideastorm and Ubuntu's Brainstorm, the Ideas area on Connect allows users to suggest product improvements directly to Symantec.

    Market researchers know that some of the best new features and product enhancements come from the minds of users who actually deploy and use the product. The Ideas area on Connect allows product users to suggest a new feature or function while giving other community members the power to validate an idea by voting it up or down.

    Popular feature requests -- as voted by the community -- get the undivided attention of marketing and development teams.

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    Groups

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/groups

    Groups are areas within the community where users with similar interests can gather to share ideas. Symantec uses Groups to give their more than 100 regional user groups a place to organize online. Group leaders can schedule meetings, communicate with their members, post agendas and presentations -- all from within their Group space on Connect.

    Private groups give the company's beta testers, advisory board members, and early adopters a quiet, confidential place to exchange messages, information and files.

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    Videos

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/videos

    Some users would rather upload videos that discuss their tips and tricks. Symantec Connect makes this possible.

    In this "YouTube" generation, almost anyone can create a screencast. And in many cases, these visual communication tools do a better job communicating a user's ideas than an article or blog post on the same topic.

    Connect was designed and configured to make submitting these information assets as quick and easy as possible.

  • Articles

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/articles

    Technical users can submit in-depth articles to Connect so other users of the community can learn from their experience and expertise.

    Connect articles have been submitted by users around the world. Teachers, trainers, systems administrators, and end users have all shared their tips, tricks, and detailed solutions to life's technical challenges via articles posted to Connect.

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    Blogs

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/blogs

    Community members are welcome to post blog entries to Connect that describe their experiences with Symantec software.

    Symantec also leverages the blog platform to spread information from company and industry experts. One example of this is in the extremely popular Security Response Blog.

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    Downloads

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/downloads

    IT departments around the world are constantly writing code snippets and utilities that make working with their enterprise infrastructure easier. Symantec gives them a place to share those tools and utilities with the community.

    Users are encouraged to submit scripts and utilities they've written to solve their own IT problems. The idea being that others who have run into similar obstacles and can use some of these user-contributed tools to solve the same problems in their local environments.

  • Events

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/security/events

    Events are a big part of running a successful software company. Connect allows all users to post events of interest to the Connect calendar. The calendar includes everything from huge industry gatherings to smaller meetings with product managers and even local user group gatherings.

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    Faceted Search

    http://www.symantec.com/connect/search/apachesolr_search/anti-virus

    Finding the solution to a problem can be particularly daunting when you are sifting through half-a-million pieces of information.

    Connect's faceted search takes a lot of the pain out of data mining. Users simply perform a search on a keyword and then refine their search by choosing from a list of possible choices ("facets" in search parlance). Users can drill into search results until they find exactly what they're looking for. And, if they find themselves at the end of a dead-end street, they can easily remove or mix-and-match facets until they find exactly what they're looking for.