The Challenge

The Cisco Support Community is a thriving community of over 500,000 users - one of the largest and most active enterprise communities on the web. However, this wasn’t always so.

In late 2009, the community - then at approximately 200,000 users - was proving too large for the underlying community platforms. The systems were growing unstable and slow. Cisco enlisted SolutionSet to migrate the platform to the more robust Jive SBS 3.0. Jive SBS 3.0, however, did not include all of the features that the Cisco Support Community members had come to know and love from the previous platforms, particularly those around user reputation. Reputation is so important to the Cisco Support Community members that some users put their CSC status on their resumes! The system needed to work the same way in order for members to continue to value their CSC status so highly. So, Cisco enlisted SolutionSet to implement custom user reputation, and other custom features, atop Jive SBS 3.0.

The Solution

Stage one included data migration from the legacy platforms onto Jive SBS 3.0, as well as integration with Cisco's enterprise SSO and the development of a Cisco-branded visual identity for the site. During the second stage, SolutionSet developed a custom user reputation system that allows users to be recognized for the quality, as well as quantity, of their contributions. Additionally, the custom user reputation system allows administrators to recognize specific users with custom badges such as "Hall of Fame Member" and "Cisco Designated VIP."

The Result

The Cisco Support Community was successfully migrated to Jive SBS 3.0 - and a year later, to SBS 4.5. Plans are in the works to migrate it to the latest and greatest Jive platform, Jive 5. In the past two years, the community has grown from 200,000 to over 500,000 users, and the Cisco - SolutionSet collaboration continues.