Customer Services & Support

 Earlier this evening, we just rolled out several fixes to Dell’s Community site. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but we’ll continue working to fix things that are important to our customers.

Some things like moving the Browse by Content Type to the top of the left-hand nav will be obvious, but several are not. Below is a list of all of them. We’ll keep working to improve the site. While we continue testing and implementing things, we appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Now onto the list:

• Added a New Thread button to make it easier to post a new thread in a forum
• Streamlined the banners across the main page areas
• Indented text in the drop-down text areas in the User Control Panel
• Added Edit/Delete functionality for blogs in Groups
• Removed redundant text entry fields in the blog comment area (no more Name, Website or Remember Me fields).
• Enabled links to comments shown in the Activity List
• Added the ability to link to comments in blog posts and forum threads
• On group pages, changed the text for areas that did not have content
• Added RSS feed on blog aggregator page
• Left navigation = Moved the Browse by Content Type section up to the top of the page
• Breadcrumb wording  = Now you navigate back to Community instead of English
• Changed order of private messages so the most recent one appears 
•  Dell logo in masthead now goes to Dell.com
• Changed wording on comment message
• Emoticon window size increased
• Enabled site theme CSS override
• Added ability to delete comments on user profile

With the holidays about to get into full swing, today we’re unveiling a new group called Gift Rap. It’s no surprise that a lot of folks are looking to buy technology for loved ones this time of year. And for many of those customers that means lots of questions… how in the heck do you make sense of all the options that are in front of you?

 With Gift Rap, we’ve worked to put all the resources you need in one place. Think of it as a place where you can get the answers to all kind of technology topics from Dell employees and community members alike.

What are the must-have gadgets this year? Do you need a desktop or a notebook? How much RAM or hard drive space makes sense? What hardware matters if you’re buying a PC for editing videos? What about a decent gaming machine that doesn’t cost big bucks? Those are just a few of the kinds of discussions you can expect to find there.

You’ll hear from Dell experts as you would expect, but we’ll also be featuring content from Walmart’s Elevenmoms community to give you helpful perspective. Most importantly though, Gift Rap is a place where you can have discussions with other customers who are part of the Dell community.

Beyond discussions, you’ll see holiday-related articles from third-party sites that may be of interest. Of course, the latest deals from Dell will always be a click away. And we’ll tweet a little bit of everything from www.twitter.com/DellGiftRap.

So, how do you get started? If you haven’t registered to be part of the Dell Community, that’s the first step. From there, you can click on the Groups section and look for the gift logo just like the one featured at the top of this post.

From there, click on the blue button like the one in the image below to join the group and that should be it.

If you own an XPS machine, or a Dell Precision workstation, it should be a little easier to find appropriate drivers for your system because we recently added global functionality on support.dell.com that limits the drivers listed to the ones that are applicable to your configuration.

We started rolling out this functionality back in July for some Inspiron laptops. Then in October, we expanded it to several lines of products including Inspiron, Latitude, Optiplex, Dimension, Vostro and Studio systems.

Though we might have been a bit too late to help customers like Neville Hobson out, hopefully this will be useful to other XPS or Dell Precision workstation customers who need to update a driver or two over the holidays.

A bit earlier today, Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang posted a video interview with Bob, who is Dell's VP of the Communities & Conversations team to get his perspective on the status of social media at Dell. 

Bob has been leading our team that's focused on developing Dell's social media efforts. He's the one who asked me to help get our blog monitoring process underway back in April 2006. In the video, Jeremiah asks Bob about Dell on Twitter, IdeaStorm,  how social media is affecting Dell as a company and more.

Several customers have let me know that RSS feeds are not working properly on Direct2Dell and other blogs within the Dell blog network. We are working to address this issue and I will update this post when we've got it fixed.

Update: As of earlier today, all of the RSS feeds from the Dell Blog Network are working again.

Really sorry for the inconvenience.