DME ResourcesAn all new year brings an all new look and an entirely different platform for our forensic multimedia community. Our new site has been redesigned from the ground up to simplify information sharing for our members. Let's take a quick look at navigating the all new members area and point out a few important changes.
1stYou'll immediately notice the new Community main page, which provides a site-wide recent activity stream, recent photo uploads, and current online members. When a member logs in they're taken directly to the Community Home page, where they'll find the Community menu across the top of the page. Hovering over the Community menu items Profile, Friends, Applications, and Inbox will display additional drop-down menu items for each of those areas. A few notes about these menu items:
- Profile Pictures - Unfortunately, we were not able to migrate member profile photos from our old community. Please take a moment to upload your profile picture - once you do, you'll immediately begin earning good Karma...and who couldn't use some of that? ;-)
- Profile Privacy Settings - By default all options are set to members only, meaning only current logged-in members can view your profile, photo albums, and friends. These settings are still under development, so your changes cannot be saved and therefore will not take affect until further notice.
- Friends & Invites - Both Friends and Invitations were migrated from our old system, and we think the new system will make it much easier to find and connect with others.
- Applications - With our profile Applications the possibilities for customizing your profile are endless! If you're familiar with Facebook, you'll feel right at home. Browse our Application library and add Apps to your profile, re-order them in any way you want, and remove & replace them at will. Add your recent blog posts, forum posts, favorite RSS feed, latest photo uploads, latest comments, latest events, a Google Map, and more!
- Groups - Our new Groups feature is accessible via the "Applications" menu tab, and provides more capability and better integration than our old site. Members can create public groups where any member can join or private groups where members have to be approved by the group's creator. Private group content is not accessible to other members. Groups are a great way for committees or working groups to share information through announcements, wall posts, and discussion threads which allow you to attach and share files with all members or only your group. Unfortunately, we were not able to migrate our old groups to the new site.
- Photos - Our new photo album feature provides a much more efficient way to share your images with your friends, colleagues and other members. From training pictures to personal photos, create an album for any reason and get to uploading!
Our Forums, Downloads, and Wiki were all able to be completely migrated to the new site. You'll also notice we brought back the old Video Library concept, although we didn't migrate the old video library content. The Video Library allows members, and now visitors, to add their favorite videos from other video hosts such as YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, BlipTV, and literally dozens more; simply visit the library, click "Add Video", past the link to your video, and click save.
2nd You'll notice that DMEpod is once again featured in place of our former Media-Geek TV service. The Media-Geek TV project may or may not be revisited for live events, but one thing is for certain - DMEpod will move forward with or without it. No promises or commitments regarding either, but we hope to release 4-6 episodes of DMEpod in 2009. Submit your content, ideas, events or feedback to us at dmepod@media-geek.com
Finally I think it's important to note that there are many minor bugs to be worked out yet, and I hope you'll take a minute to help identify and report them. If you're having a problem or have a question, pop over to our Forums and post problems in the Help!!! How Do I... forum area. Of course, feel free to shoot me a private message or send a note via our contact form. We're working hard to resolve issues and further develop features and capabilities to support information sharing activities for our community, and I for one am very excited about what's in store for our community in 2009.
Thanks for participating, and remember to tell your peers & colleagues to Sign-Up, Sign-In, and Contribute!
