S6 102: Content Creation Tools Overview

Hi, this is Chris from Knowledge Architecture. I'm going to introduce you to some of the basic content creation tools in Synthesis six. Now I want you to think of this like arriving to a new city and taking a double decker bus tour to see all the main sites so you can plan what you'd like to visit. Next, we're going to take a look at a preview of your toolkit, show you some example pages, and give you what you need to start creating content in synthesis 6. We'll start by taking a look at communities and Community homepages. Communities are the building blocks of synthesis and are used to subdivide your intranet's content and posts into logical sections. This example intranet has six home HR and office projects in practice, technology, marketing, and learning hovering on each community in the top Navigation shows the top two levels of content within each community via the Mega menu and if I click on one of the communities, I go to a community homepage where you can see the community name, you can access the community navigation. You'll likely have an activity stream, an about section, and a Community Managers block, which is new. In synthesis 6, the community managers block automatically displays the community managers assigned to this community. The next major tool I want to introduce you to is the Content Outliner. The Content Outliner is the engine for organizing and structuring content on your synthesis intranet. Let's take a look. You can open the Content Outliner from the utility bar in the upper right. You'll see it opens directly to the community you are viewing and shows you the top level of community navigation. If I expand a section, you'll see that it matches the navigation in the Community navigation bar as well as in the Mega menu. From the Content Outliner, I can add new resources including pages, links, guides, libraries, and communities. I can reorder resources via drag and drop, and when I do that, the navigation will be updated immediately. I can also rename resources, edit them, duplicate them, unpublish or publish them, move them, or delete them. The Content Outliner is a powerful tool you'll get quite familiar with as you organize and structure your communities and create new content. The next tool in your toolkit I'd like to show you is Navigation Pages. Navigation pages exist to help users navigate the Internet by breaking down content into higher level sections or categories. This example illustrates the principle that navigation pages generally don't have much content on them themselves, but are used as wayfinding devices to help people navigate your intranet. By providing clear information sent via a limited number of Categories which will lead someone towards what they are looking for. For example, I'm going to click on benefits, and after reviewing my choices, I'll click on medical and dental. Ah, there's that annual benefits notices document I was looking for. Let's insert a navigation block into a page to show how it works. I'm going to navigate over to the Offices page in HR and Office, and as I do that, you'll notice that I have created pages for each one of our eight offices. Okay, the Office's pages is blank, so I'll click on the edit pencil in the upper right. I'm now in the Page editor and I'm going to jump straight into the Insert menu where I'll choose the navigation block. Don't worry, I'll be back to talk about the other blocks in a bit. You'll see that I have the choice between a basic navigation block, which allows me to manually create a collection of links to internal or external resources, or a smart navigation block which will automatically display the resources under Offices in the Content Outliner, I'm going to choose the Smart block option, and when I do that, you'll see our eight offices appear in the Block Preview. I'll click Next and then choose from one of four layouts. I'm going to select the default layout, which is grid, and click Next. You can see that I have several options to further customize the layout of my block and including column size, image size, text position, and more. Meaning that I can dial in the configuration of my block to get it just the way I want it. I'm going to change the text position to bottom, change the column size to large, change the image size to extra large, and click Next. I'll keep my block title hidden and click Finish. Now that I've added my block, I'm going to add my images. Starting with Boston, I'll click the edit pencil in the middle of the image placeholder. And notice that I can add my image via upload, drag and drop by inserting a library image. More on that later, or by choosing from one of our stock icons. I'm going to upload an image. Great, there's one down. I'm going to use some magic and teleport to the future where I've uploaded the other images and then click Publish. Et voila. A smart navigation block. So whether you are using a navigation block with images, stock icons, logos, or our index layout, navigation pages are a great tool for helping users navigate a large collection of resources. Speaking of tools for navigating a large Collection of Resources the next tool I'd like to introduce are guides. I'm going to head over to our marketing community and take a look at our Brand guide. When I click on the guide in the Mega menu, you'll see that I'm automatically taken to the first page in the guide, which in this example is called Introduction. On the right side of the guide is the guide outline, which I can use to both understand what content is available in the guide as well as to navigate the guide. At the bottom of each page you'll find footers which you can use to navigate backwards and forwards in the guide. The guide outline and the footers are are added and maintained via the Content Outliner. So if I open the Content Outliner, you'll see all of the pages in the Brand guide and that if I move a page to a new location, the guide outline updates as do the page footers. And the Mega menu. To add pages to my guide, I can either drag in an existing page. Or I can add a new one by clicking Add. You'll notice that the only resource type I can add to a guide is a page. As you can see, guides are a great tool for organizing a large collection of pages focused on a single topic, such as brand guides, employee handbooks, manuals of practice, or BIM manuals. The next tools I'd like to introduce you to are content pages and blocks. Before I dive into the specifics of creating pages with Synthesis six, I'd like to give you a bird's eye view of the different types of blocks you'll have to work with and show you some example. Pages along with text blocks are the core of Synthesis six Pages There are two types of blocks in Synthesis six content blocks which let you add documents, videos, images, employees, projects, posts, tables and embedded content into your page, and structural blocks which you use to organize the content on your pages. Structural blocks include navigation blocks which we've already talked about, table of contents blocks, collapsible sections and lines which are all handy ways to help a user quickly find what they are looking for on a content rich page. Let's start by looking at some examples of content blocks in action. This Deltec vantage point page is a two column page with a video block and grid layout on the left and an employee block and compact grid layout on the right. And now here's that same page using the compact grid layout for the video block. Here's a page about our HR system with a single video block on it. Here's a medical and dental page with a Document block in grid layout and then that same page with the document block in compact grid layout. This committees page is a full width page with multiple employee blocks in grid layout. As I scroll down the page, you can see the committee members for each committee. If I wanted to make this page easier to use, I could try using a couple of the structural blocks I mentioned before. Here's that same page with the table of contents block dropped in. The table of contents provides me with a summary of the page and allows me to jump directly to the committee I'm interested in. Or I can streamline the page by configuring each employee block to be collapsed by default. This payroll page has several frequently asked questions on it. If I wanted to make this page easier to use, I could try dropping a table of contents on the page and placing a line between each section. Or I could use our collapsible sections block to streamline the page. This company Holidays page is using a table block. This Revit Users Group page is using our Posts block in the grid layout to display all of the posts with the hashtag rug. Finally, this higher Education page is using a projects block in grid layout. Okay, now that we've looked at several example pages, let's go ahead and build one. I'll navigate to HR and Office Time and Travel and then open the Content Outliner. I'm going to create a new page called Paid Time Off. I'll click Add and then Add Page Synthesis six ships with several out of the box templates which you can edit, as well as tools to help you create your own templates using the Page Templates feature. When I click on each template, you'll see that I get a preview on the left. For now, I'm going to select the blank two column page template and click Next. I'll give my page a title and click Finish. Now I want to direct your attention to the draft status of this page. When you add a new page in synthesis 6, it is added in Draft status and you can tell a page is in draft by the draft bubble next to the page title as well as in the Content Outliner where where the page title is italicized and has a gray dot next to it. A page being in Draft status means it won't show up in Search and it won't show up in Navigation. So if I were to navigate back up to HR and Office in the Mega menu, I don't see paid Time off under Time and Travel and if I were to navigate back up to the Time and Travel page, I Don't see paid time off in the Smart navigation block. So paid time off is just available via the Content Outliner for global administrators and the community managers and content editors of the HR and office community until it is published. This means that you can work on the page iteratively over multiple sessions and then publish it when you're ready. Okay, I'm going to edit the page. You can see I'm in a two column layout and across the top I have a pretty standard editing toolbar including different text styles, text formatting tools, a tool for linking text. I've got bullets, numbered lists, and different alignment tools. And if I click on Insert I have some different blocks which I can add to the page. All right, I'm going to start by adding some text. Now I'm going to format the text to add in some headings to make it easier to read. I'll add in a section on requesting PTO using BambooHR and then I'll upload a video by clicking Insert Videos. You'll see I have a choice between adding a single video, a basic block which allows me to add multiple videos directly to the page, or a smart block which allows me to add multiple videos from a library. I'm going to come back to libraries in a few minutes, but for now I'll choose the single video option and click Next. I have the option to upload from my computer, drag and drop or insert a library video. I'm going to select Upload from computer and select my video. I'll speed through the process of the video uploading and processing. And now that my video is finished, I'll add an employee block. In the right column I'll click Insert Employees and I have a choice between a basic employee block which lets me add employees by name to manually build a list of employees, or to use a smart employee block which lets me add employees using fields like Department, Discipline, Office, or Certification. To create a list of employees, I'm going to choose Basic. This time. I'm going to add Betty, our CFO and Geo, our HR director. As in most of our blocks I have different layouts to choose from. Grid, Compact Grid, and List. I'll choose the default, which is Compact Grid. I'm going to accept the defaults in terms of what data to display for each employee in the block, I'll accept the default headshot size and I'll name this block Contact and say finish. You might have noticed that as I was creating this page it was auto saving changes. That way if you lose Internet connectivity or something happens to your computer, your work will be preserved for you to continue editing when you return. Before I publish my page, I want to show a couple more page editing tools. If I click the More Options Ellipsis, you'll see that I have the ability to save, save and close or discard changes. You'll see that I can switch the layout of my page so I can switch between two column and full width. And after looking at full width, I think I'm going to keep it two column. Okay, now that my page is finished, I'll go ahead and publish it. Now. If I hover on the HR and Office in the Mega menu, you'll see that Paid Time off appears under Time and Travel. And if I were to click on Time and Travel on the Breadcrumbs, you'll see that Paid Time off has been added to the Smart navigation block. The last thing I want to do is select a stock icon for my new Paid Time off page. I'll edit the page. And then click on the pencil icon in the Image placeholder next to Paid Time Off. I'm going to choose Stock Icon this time, and when I do that, you'll see that I'm presented with a searchable database of over 2 million stock icons to choose from. I'll search on vacation. And pick this icon of a deck chair with an umbrella. You can see I have the option to change the color, but I'm going to stick with the default and click Add. Nice. I'll click Publish and I'm done. My last step is to move Paid Time off up to the first position in this section. You. Let's take a minute to recap what we've covered so far. We've talked about communities and community homepages. We've introduced the Content Outliner. We've looked at navigation pages and guides as tools for organizing large collections of resources, and talked about content pages and blocks. The final two topics I'd like to introduce are libraries and links. Let's talk about Libraries First. I'll start by saying that I'm just going to touch lightly on libraries in this video. Libraries will be covered in depth in a separate video in the Getting Started series, but for now, a key thing for you to know is that there are three types of document libraries, video libraries and image libraries. Let's take a look at a document library. So we're in the Presentations library in the marketing community. You can see that I have a search bar, filters. Saved views, that this library is grouped by a custom field called Topic that I can sort the library, and I have a grid layout as well as a list layout as well as several tools to help me manage my library. Here's another document library in our projects and practice community called Standards Library. And here's a video library in our learning community called Training Videos. You'll notice that video libraries have the same tools as document libraries, such as search filters, grouping and sorting. And here's an image library in our marketing community called Stock Images. The final thing I'd like to share about libraries is that image libraries have been optimized to contain images, video libraries have been optimized to contain videos, and document libraries are more generic and can hold any type of supported file. Okay, great. Now let's talk about links. I'm going to click back into HR and Office and expand the accounting section. I'm also going to open up the technology community and expand business applications. In this demo example, after consulting with stakeholders and testing with users, the Intranet team decided that the Deltek Vantage Point page belongs in business applications but should be linked to from accounting. So underneath accounting, I'll click Add. I'll select Add Link. You'll see that I have the choice between linking to a Synthesis resource, a resource that lives on the Internet, or an external resource. I'm going to link to that Deltec Vantage Point page and you can see that I have the option to open that page in a new tab. By default, links to synthesis resources are not opened in a new tab, and links to external resources are linked in a new tab. And you can see that Synthesis takes the title of that page and makes it the title of your link automatically. You can override that, obviously. Now we'll click Apply. You can see that Deltec Vantage Point got added to the Smart Navigation block, and if I open the Mega menu for HR and Office, the link to Deltec Vantage Point is there as well. If I click on that link, I'm taken to that Deltec Vantage Point page in the technology community. That's it for our Getting started video on content creation tools. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments and happy building.