Ideastorm 2.0 Launched Today!

Today the IdeaStorm 2.0 project comes to fruition with the launch of the re-designed website. With the new Ideastorm website, you will have access to many great new features including the following.

• The new home page will combine Featured content, Recent Ideas and Trending ideas. We have also added two new sections highlighting some of our top contributors and implemented ideas.
• The new user profile will allow site members to upload their personal avatar photo, bio and social networking links, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
• Changes to idea posting will include the addition of a “tip” section so your ideas have the best chance of gaining approval from the community and meeting the Terms of Use for the site. We have also improved the duplicate idea checker to find ideas on the site that may already cover your new idea as you type in the title.
• Idea posters will have a new tool at their disposal to evolve their idea based on comments  -- their own or from other community members. If the idea poster finds a comment to their idea adds value, then they will have the ability to promote it to being considered an “Extension” of their idea.
• As a result of the Dell Community Rockstar program now including contributors from IdeaStorm, new user levels have been added to the site in order to recognize these individuals. While our Idea Partners have been easily recognizable by their title, our Rockstars will now be as well.

While not visible by site members, we have also updated how we process ideas behind the scenes in order to streamline the process and enable us to more easily communicate about ideas, track their progress and close the loop faster.

Last, but not least, we have added an automated archival system in order to clean out older ideas and make room for new ones. Any idea that is over 6 months old and has not been given the status of “Under Review”, “Implemented” or “Partially Implemented” will be archived off of the main site into a separate repository. Once an idea is archived we will accept a new version of the idea on the site to start the process anew. If multiple versions of the idea are submitted we will merge them all into the first Idea on the topic.

I’m looking forward to the new IdeaStorm and advancing the ideation process between our valued customers and Dell. I hope everyone enjoys the new site. I welcome your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.