What is changing?
This past August, the Community Team announced several updates and improvements to the Community guides via this blog post. Hopefully you’ve started to enjoy the new diverse format, which can now be found in our Impact guides! As part of the guide audit and cleanup by the Community Team, the decision was made to enhance the efficiency of guide creation and maintenance moving forward. One of these efficiency steps includes the consolidation and simplification of duplicative guides. Right now, it’s possible that the same guide is repeated multiple times and found in different areas of the Community with the only differences being the role in the title and the URL (based on where the guide is organized). Moving forward, in cases where the content of the article is the same and the only thing that changes is the role and/or URL, the guides will be consolidated into a single guide and surfaced in any/all role-specific areas as needed.
What does this mean for Impact?
As you all know, the Impact Support Center incorporates the Instructure Guides to provide role-based, contextualized support for all of your users inside of Canvas when they need it and where they need it. We pull in the articles dynamically based on their URLs. This means that if/when the Community URLs change, support articles can break (if no redirect URL is provided or if the redirect URL doesn’t work). Additionally, we have to bulk update the support article titles to accurately reflect the new guides. The contextualization will remain, so that the right users see the right articles. If support articles are included in out-of-the-box content such as Campaign templates or Walkthrough templates, those templates will be updated as well to reflect the changes.
We have been working with the Community Team on timelines for all of the changes (which will include all Instructure products over the next several months) to identify all of the changes that are taking place, as they take place, and are working diligently behind the scenes to make updates in bulk as quickly as possible to ensure no interruption in service. With that being said, we do want to make you aware that it is possible that you or your users stumble upon an article that has been broken and want you to know that we are doing everything that we can to ensure that this doesn’t happen. Currently, there is no need to report this to Support, as we are aware. Canvas guides should all be done and updated by this quarter and I will update you along the way. Mastery Connect guides will follow after Canvas (which will only affect the Mastery Connect LTI guides in Impact). Only if you stumble upon a broken link after an update has been made here in the Product Blog that all of a product’s guides have been completely updated should you reach out to Support.
What do you need to do?
- If you have any campaigns, messages, and/or walkthroughs currently running, please check the links to make sure that they are working. Update them as needed.
- When you pull in out-of-the-box templates to use, please double check the links before publishing.
- When you create campaigns, messages, and walkthroughs from scratch, make sure to leverage the current links to guides as they appear in the Community at that time.
- If you notice a broken link to a guide in the Impact Support Center, no need to report to the Support Team yet. Only report to our Support Team after we’ve posted an update that a product (such as Canvas) has been completely updated.
