Collaborate within your company and with AWS using AWS re:Post Private

Right. Hello everyone. Good evening. How is everyone doing? I understand like I think it's time for replay. But before that, we have, we have an exciting presentation on repost. Uh so I just wanted to kick off and say like, thank you for joining us. Uh have you felt the need to build a community at your organization? And have you thought it is a slow process? And have you felt the need to increase the knowledge for your cloud developers?

Hi, my name is, so I'm the senior manager for AWS knowledge management. Yeah, thanks Cy. Uh I'm Nain Thar. I'm a product manager in AWS. I've been with AWS for, for four years.

So today we will be talking about how to accelerate your cloud journey and improve your developers productivity. And the way we're gonna do is through knowledge sharing and community collaboration.

So this is the agenda we have:

First, we will talk about one of the challenges with knowledge management and community collaboration that we have learned from our talking to our customers. Our customers have reached out to us.

Then I have exciting news. We will be introducing a new product, new service to address the challenges that our customers have been telling us we'll talk about the benefits and features of the services and then we'll see a demonstration and how you can get started.

So let's talk about the challenges.

So many of the enterprises are customers like yours. You have a very clear cloud strategy and your builders, developers are already implementing the strategy. However, what customers are telling us that builders, they are having a discussions but often siloed, they are collaborating but it's siloed. They are either collaborating within emails, chats, slacks or one on one conversations and those interactions are meaningful. They are solving the issues at that particular moment. Whoever has a question, what's challenging is that those interactions have a very short lifespan. Those interactions are not converting into a reusable knowledge. That's what the number one concern that we have heard from many customers. There's a lack of unified knowledge base, there are content available but it's distributed. There's no source of truth. What is the right content? A developer can find a content at one place and another place as well. But it's hard to tell which one is the right one to use.

Uh this is one of the most common theme that customers are saying building community is a slow process and many times it's very slow process, it requires to narrow down a platform, it requires to bring the community on board, it requires content, it requires curated content, trustworthy content. So it's really coming across as a hindrance to accelerating your journey to the cloud.

And finally, there are training content it exists, there are multiple training content exist. However, the training content are not curated or presented in a learning path so that it's easier for developers to consume. Additionally, what we have seen that industry, global knowledge management industry said that knowledge workers are spending 30% of their time searching for just the information, what they are looking for. And almost a third of the time they are failing to find the right information. Imagine the impact of productivity because of this,

To summarize what we have learned from our customers. We have observed of ourselves. We have an internal community as well. The senior leadership like yourself and people in your organization at enterprises, they need a new way to equip their builders with training on cloud concepts and drive collaboration. Now, this collaboration is within your own team, combined with AWS teams as well, really to define and implement their cloud strategy at scale.

How are AWS is going to solve a problem for you our customers to address these challenges?

So I'm very pleased to announce a new product that we launched on November 26th. Earlier this week, it's called AWS Repost Private. What is it? It is your own private repos to collaborate within your company and with AWS.

Now many of you may know AWS Repost, but what it is it's a service that we launched two years ago at ReInvent 2021. It's a community knowledge service managed and hosted by AWS. This is where it's a public community where customers partners, AWS employees, they come and share knowledge and it's accessible to everyone.

So many of our customers, when they saw public repos, they came to us and they say, can we get a private version of this? So good news. This is what it is. It's a private version for you to manage your community and your content.

So with this AWS Repost, Private, it offers a curated content from AWS and a discussion forum that essentially involves your team members as well as AWS team members to collaborate and start sharing knowledge.

Let's take a look at the benefits and features of a private repost.

So with the number one benefit is you can build your cloud community of practice or if you already have one, you can further strengthen it using the private repo. It streamlines collaboration and knowledge sharing within your own company. And with AWS, you can improve the productivity by centralizing the knowledge and it becomes a scalable one place to search AWS technology specific knowledge, which could be a private specific to your workload knowledge.

Additionally, the curated content that's provided by AWS, you can train your teams faster and it happens through AWS provides the curated training and technical content which is organized and structured in a way where it's easier for developers to consume.

And additionally, the the primary benefit is there are discussions going to happen in the private post. Some of those discussions may not resolve in a resolution. You or developers can convert those discussions into a support cases. AWS support cases and can get the response back from the support engineering. And you will have a choice to convert that interaction that's currently logged in a support case to make it available and visible to your community within your private repost.

Let's take a look at what are the feature sets. So there are two primary parts of private repost. One is a creating a repost and managing it, which really happens in AWS management console. And the second is the developer or your builders a site where they can go and use daily to consume knowledge or collaborate with their colleagues or with AWS employees.

So you have a control to access, you decide who can access your private post. So this service is integrated with AWS identity center which allows you to hook up your identity that developers will be using to log into the private post, which includes you can have your own SSO can bring your own active directory or any SAMUAL integrations and then you can configure it.

You can use the branding that your marketing suggest by the look and feel. You can specify a custom subdomain. For example, ABC Corp may want to say that I want to have like abc corp dot private dot repost dot aws for my developers to go and directly access the the private repost.

And then you can define the roles. There are normal users who can interact, search with the service and there are admins who configure and set up the process and set up the the private post and there are moderators who will continue to moderate the content that's happening on the on the private post, we have a concept of experts as well.

So in your organization, you may have some experts, you may want to designate them as an expert. What they additionally have the capability to validate answers, which is a huge benefit when they see an answer, which is useful, they can just endorse it. This raises the trust in the content and answer a versus answer b if answer b is validated by an expert, it raises the trust for the third person to consuming that.

Yes, expert has seen the answer with private post, you really centralize your AWS knowledge. So the content is organized, it follows a standard taxonomy which is very similar to what public repost offers. So we have a concept of tags and topics. Tags are services such as lambda ec 2 s3 and topics are like grouping of similar services like technologies like analytics is a topic. So or less is a topic.

Additionally, you can create your own custom tags which may be specific to your application that's controlled through the admin part, private post offers curated content. So AWS will provide curate content for faster on boarding during the setup process you will see in the demo. We ask what are your primary use cases? And we have a team of subject matter experts and tech writers who are producing content. We publish those content in private post four year developers to consume in a structured fashion.

Additionally, you can create your own private or proprietary content. You can ask questions, create articles specific to your workloads and we have a concept of selections as well which is an aggregated knowledge following through or based on a specific topic or a use case. It helps again in creating a learning path. Anybody on within the private repo can create any of these contents and then you can scale your private cloud community.

This really happens in collaboration with the AWS account team. So AWS DAMs technical account managers, they get automatically added to this service at the time of creation. But then you have an option to bring in other account team members like solution architects or others, which i highly recommend that you bring them into this private post. So they have a they can provide their guidance and whatever guidance they are providing is reusable. That's the most important part. They are already providing guidance. They are helping you through the journey. In some cases, it's not getting captured, it may getting lost. And the authenticity or the validation is not happening on those guidance

To engage the community, we offer gamification. So private post comes with reputation points. Developers love to compete, they earn points, they can provide answers, they earn points, they earn badges. It comes with everything that's offered on the public repost as well.

So experts review i talked about you can designate some senior members who have really good understanding of your your workloads your architecture. They can be explicitly marked as experts. Their profile will display they are the experts. So content posted by them will carry a higher value for anybody else to consume.

Then we have notifications. This is a really exciting way to bring back your developers into, into the private repost. So we offer notifications through emails. Any user can follow either tax topics or other community experts to stay notified. If any activity happens, they will get an email and we have flexibility in how users want to receive emails. They can get an instant email or they can batch it into a digest for a daily digest or a weekly digest.

Let's take a look at how is the user experience going to look like? So this is a high level flow. I'm gonna talk about two high level person. One is uh admin who is the person responsible for customizing and creating the the private post. The journey starts as like a council admin, somebody who has the right permission in AWS management council will go and they can find the service in management council

They will hook up the identity center, they can assign the encryption keys. You can choose AWS provided keys or your own. And this is where they will specify a name again. You can call it like it's my ABC Corp repo or XYZ Corp repo. So it's very clear and distinct that it's different from the public repo.

The same console admin will assign, they will make an admin for the private repo. And this admin's job is to customize the UI and logo as you will see in the demo to make it look clearly distinct, have some identity to, to your repo as well. And they will have the flexibility to assign roles. This is where they can assign somebody, an expert or a moderator additionally.

What they will do is they will select primary use cases. Let's say if your team is primarily focused on migration or gen, once they will choose those use cases, AWS will provide the curated content that's exclusively available only within private repo. So you will get to see that and we'll see an exciting demo on that coming up shortly.

So at this point, private repo is ready to use by your developers. I talked about terms will get additionally added to the repo, but you have a choice, you can ask for more solution architects and others to be get added which which can happen at any point in time.

So once the private repo is ready, what will developers do? They, they will have a URL like abc-corp.private.repo.aws. They can log in using the authentication that console had been set in the previous step. It's going to be the same one.

They will complete their profile and they can upload picture and they can set their notification settings as well, but it's ready to use for them. They can start searching the content. When they search content, what we have done is there is a very valuable public content that lives on public repo as well. So within the search, we clearly return the result - this is your private repo result and this is your public repo result.

If they want to consume public repo content in full, they will have to go out of private repo and go to the public repo. However, if they want to have a private discussion on a public content, which is very useful, they can fork off a private thread within your private repo just to have a collaborative discussion.

Let's say a public content comes out, but you want to see how does it apply to ABC Corp - you can just initiate a discussion within your own private repo.

Then selections we talked about, it's really a set that you can combine and stitch them together for your learners or beginners to consume or anybody can consume. Or anybody can create those. These are like aggregations offered in a structured manner. And it comes with the discussion forum, anybody can ask questions, comments, they can upload, they can post articles as well.

And one of the things that they can do is which is really they can convert a question to a support case. So often it may happen that community is discussing a question and answer. But at some point, they may say, oh ok, we need somebody else to provide a comment.

So we have built in a capability that they can convert a thread into a support case inside the private repo. So we have done an integration with AWS Support Center as well. And when they convert it, that thread is locked. Community members can continue to have a discussion. But the communication that's happening between the case person who has created the case and support engineer is logged only to certain roles.

And once the case is closed, that role person having that role has an option to make that correspondence available to other members of the private repo. It's really a we want to unlock the knowledge that's right now, getting trapped in any of the support cases or in one on one conversations.

What will be the role and the functions of AWS account team? So they will log into the same account team, same private repo, they will use Amazon login, which is Amazon midway. They will be providing you guidance and content the way they are doing it today. Either probably they are part of some Slack workspaces in some customers use that or in an email or an alias of an email rather than going through that hard to search hard to provide or get any discussion on that.

AWS account team will start providing guidance in this private repo. And additionally, if you want somebody to get added to, to this private repo, if you are talking to like a specialist SA or somebody, they will be your point of contact. They will facilitate the process to get those additional AWS account team members added into the private repo. And it works the other way as well. If you want somebody to be taken out of the private repo, TAMs will facilitate that process.

So let's see this service in action. I'll invite CSI again to take us through the demo.

Thanks Li. So before we jump into the, into the demo, Li mentioned about the three pillars on how you can successfully build and scale the community and build the knowledge for your organization. Earlier this week, we did a session ARC 207 - please take a look at it that shapes some of the best practices around how you can build the community and then how you can use some of the best practices around building the community.

So with that, I would love to jump into the demo. There are two demos that we are presenting to you today. One is the admin experience where admin goes to the console and creates the service in less than five minutes, they can create this service and then launch it. And once it launched the developers can start using it, how they can consume content and all the capabilities that Nathan mentioned, so that I'll be demonstrating those.

So to start off creating your private repo from console, you can go to AWS console, select Services, Customer Enablement and then select Repo Private and you will land on Repo Private console homepage. From there, you can click on Create Repo Private.

Repo Private offers 22 tiers of pricing - one is a free tier, it's available for free for six months with all the standard set of capabilities. The second tier is standard tier, it's $12 per user per month and you can choose the right tier based on your use case.

In terms of defining the Repo Private, you can specify your own name and then you can provide a description for the service. This name is visible only to the console admin, this is to recognize the service within the console. And you can also specify a custom subdomain, like mentioned in his example, like ABC Corp, you can mention in this case, I'm saying CC as Cloud Central as a custom subdomain, but you can always define your own custom subdomain.

And then we also integrate with KMS - Key Management Service. So in order for you to encrypt your data, you can specify a custom key or create a new key or use an existing KMS key.

And then in terms of service access, repo private is integrated with Support Center so that you can create support cases from unanswered questions or conversations within your private space. In order to do that, you need to enable service access by specifying a role using IAM Identity Center. So in this case, I'm selecting an existing role, but you can also choose a specific role.

Then tags are optional to recognize your service from billing and other standpoint. And then you can create the repo private by clicking on the Create Repo button. It takes approximately 30 minutes to create this private repo. And when the repo is created for your organization, you will receive an email notification.

So you'll see that there is custom subdomain and data generated subdomain. Custom subdomain is by default not approved, it's pending approval. So a technical account manager goes in, reviews that it is a valid request to protect our customers' subdomain requests. For example, ABC Corp, we want to make sure that it is indeed ABC Corp requesting this. They will review and validate the subdomain and then until then you can use the AWS auto generated subdomain and you can also integrate with CloudFront and use your own DNS as well.

So now the Repo Private, your organization specific Repo Private, is created and I receive an automated email notification after 30 minutes that the service is created. And then at this point, the service is not really usable. You need to configure the users, which means basically you need to add users to the service.

Repo Private is integrated with IAM Identity Center, formerly known as AWS SSO. So using this, you can configure users using IA Store which provides a set of users that you can define and link to private repo. Or you can link through existing SSO like Active Directory or Okta or some of the other third party SSO providers. This is similar to how you manage your existing business applications using IIC.

So to add users in this example, I'm using users from IA Identity Store. So in this case, select your private repo to which you want to add users, select the Users tab and then click on Add users and user groups - you can add individual users or user groups. In this case, I have three users and we're adding that and assigning it to the private repo. At this point, users will be able to access your private repo.

You also need to assign an administrator to configure your private repo application. You can do that by going into Users and then specify, select an admin user and then mark them as administrator. So the role gets updated in the service and then the administrator is now ready to configure your private repo and launch it for your organization.

In the third step, the administrator will go to the actual private repo application, set it up and configure it in line with your organizational needs. Like Nathan mentioned, you can define your branding, you can define the custom tags and also you can also classify your organizational knowledge based on that.

In order to do that, you will sign in into the application based on the subdomain that you created - custom subdomain or AWS generated subdomain. And this is the welcome screen with the steps to perform. Once you click on Start Setup, you can specify the title of your private repo - in this case, I want to call it as Cloud Central. You can name it like Knowledge Hub or whatever relevant to your organization's needs. And you can also provide a description that will be used to greet your developers in the organization.

And then once you specify that you can also upload the logo for your private repo, your own organization specific logo, and then choose primary and secondary colors. Primary color is the color used in the header and the navigation. And then the secondary color is used for the buttons. And then you can save and continue. As you can see, the color theme and color scheme has already changed based on my primary and secondary color selection.

The next step is adding tags. So by default, AWS standard set of tags are available in your private version of repo. In addition, you can add your custom tags - like for example, in this case, I'm adding a few tags like "Central" and then a couple of other tags like "Java" and "Generative AI". So you can create as many tags, you cannot create duplicate tags. And you can also, you cannot create tags that start with "AWS" or "Amazon" because they are intended to use for the AWS products.

And then similarly, you can add blocked terminology. For example, if you want your developers not to disclose certain product names that you use internally, so you can prevent them from using such words by blocking the keywords. By default AWS Repo Private blocks profanity and certain other unwanted words that are not recommended for using to protect the community. But in addition, you can provide your own blocked keywords and terminology.

And once you are done with that, you can continue to the next step.

So the last step is uh really specifying your topics of interest. As Nathan mentioned earlier, uh you can specify topics of interest for your builders. For example, if you are running workloads related to analytics and storage and if, if you're interested in well architected framework, you can specify those topics of interest and then launch your private post.

So once you do that, your private post is ready for your uh developers to uh start using. So that's a three step process.

Now, I'll walk you through how the developers can log in and start using the private post capabilities.

So to start with uh first, they can log in using the single sign on method that you have specified. Uh like I mentioned, uh you can use either the im identity store or your own single sign on integrated. So they can log in and once they log in, uh they will, they will go to the welcome screen with the branding that we have specified.

And then the user has to complete their profile in order to um start accessing the service. So they can pro provide their uh u user name, display name and email address. And then they can also specify the language of preference.

So we support six languages in the user interface and the uh for, for knowledge sharing. Uh so the language that is the interface and notification language is the language that is displayed in the user interface and the user can choose that. And then the, the content language is the language that the user would like to consume. And they can choose uh these uh six languages.

So we currently support these six languages and once they choose these languages and set up and then they can complete their profile and they are ready to start using their service.

So at this point, uh in the home screen, they will see a set of selections that are curated based on the topics of interest that the administrator has selected. So the topics of interest um uh i will, i will jump into it and then describe it a bit more a little later.

But before that, once the user signs up, the admin can set up specific roles. So without the user signing in the admin won't be able to know who's, who the users are and they won't, they won't be able to set up roles.

So the roles are expert moderator and support case creator. So Nathan mentioned earlier uh about these roles.

So in order to do that administrator can go to uh administration and then go to permissions tab and select the users. So there are three types of users, expert users can review answers on private, on your private post and make sure that they are validated. And then moderators can ensure uh the the service is protected in terms of abuse and other aspects. And then support requesters can create support cases from directly from the conversations on repost on privately post.

So you can see that uh admin user is by default moderator and then uh we have selected and use expert user and assigned expert role. Uh similarly uh selected another user and assigned uh support role. Uh so which means they can create support cases, i support cases.

So once these permissions are set up, uh the users are now ready and they can, they can start performing those actions. And as you can see all all users have, you know, multiple roles assigned here.

So next, next is how do the user log in and browse and stay engaged? So once they log in, they can browse and stay engaged. Like I mentioned based on the topics of interest, they can see the selections. In this case, there is an example how to optimize costs on uh when you're using amazon aurora workload.

So here we have carefully curated high quality content around um cost optimization for aurora by curating resources from different locations. This also includes uh uh you know, best practices and how you can manage cost. So we have some curated set of selections available and we feed it as part of uh based on the topics of interest.

But in addition, you can also create your own selections. So going back to the home page in addition to selections, you have questions and then popular topics and leader board. And then when you go to the questions tab, there are a couple of questions that are posted already.

Um and then there are no community articles. So you can go and publish a community articles in the interest of time. I'm not demonstrating the complete flow on publishing articles, but you can publish community articles and then you can also publish selection.

So the way you can create selections is you can specify the metadata around the selection and then the description and you can create a section just like how you create table of contents and then organize different assets under that selection in the form of a curated learning path or curated uh content um assets. And then we have tags and topics.

So tags are like i mentioned uh aws uh services. or aws technologies. in addition, custom tags that you have created. And then we also have topics, uh topics are aggregation of uh multiple tags like Nathan described earlier. You can follow a topic or a tag to stay informed on the uh updates.

Uh for example, if a content asset is posted related to the tag or topic, you will be notified via email notifications. Uh in this case, I'm following a couple of topics of interest. And then when you go to my my dashboard, uh you can see the gamification there.

Uh so for this user, you already earn 40 points for completing your profile. And then there are different gamification tiers that users get and then you can define um you in future, we plan to add custom badging and you can add badges to define the engagement and ensure that users are engaged.

In addition, as part of my dashboard, I can see my questions, my answers and all the content that i contributed. But also i can see my activities as a, as a user. So these are the activities i logged in, asked the question, followed the topic and all of that.

So uh so the uh based and then the next step is searching content from uh aws three posts. So in addition to the content that is privately available to you, you can also search public content that is available on aws repos directly from your private repos.

So here when i perform the search. there are two tabs. one is private results and second one is public results. i can see there is a knowledge article that is available from public repost in line with my search criteria. And then i can click and directly access that within my private repost experience.

And then uh in terms of uh there is a perma link as well that will take you to the actual external public repost. and uh you can always come back as you can see the experience is different between the public repost and your private repost.

Next is uh create private discussion threads on public repost. Uh so on, on, on your uh public content uh like Nathan mentioned, uh you can if there is a thread that is public and if it's of interest for you. And for example, here, I'm i'm looking to see how to delete uh branch in code commit. And as a developer, they want to make sure that if it, if it is, if it works from their uh in their context and uh in your context, so then you can specify um you can, you can click on start discussion thread and then you can ask a question within your private environment related to the public content.

And once you ask that question, you can tag questions using standard aws taxonomy or your custom tags. In this case, it's tagged with code commit and then you can click on the post question. This question is now posted and any community member within your community can take a look and respond to this question on this question.

Uh for example, somebody has responded but we want to make sure it is validated. So back on the experts. So the like Nathan mentioned earlier, we have the expert role where experts can review and validate answers to make sure they are accurate. Uh ensure that you know, there is trusted knowledge that is available for your developers.

So in this case, experts can click on review button. That button is only enabled for uh uh folks with expert role. And then they if if depending on the type of response in this case, it looks correct and then expert can review and validate that answer. And and as you can see, it says, expert has validated this answer and reviewed and validated by them.

So it it earns trust in your community and make sure that the content is up to date and accurate.

And uh the, the last capability that i want to demonstrate today is creating a support case directly from your private post. So for, for users with support role permission, uh they can create a support case. It's this, this is not created this sorry. Uh this role is not uh provided uh for everybody. Like like i demonstrated earlier, admin has designated certain individuals uh with this particular role and they can create support cases.

You can see there is a button to create support cases. Once you click on that, you can take the complete thread and uh create a create a support case from here. In this case, um i'm, i'm directly creating a support case uh to our support team.

So I'm just adding a flag to indicate that uh it's a test case and then uh create support case uh it. Uh and then you will get a confirmation saying that the support case is created uh for this particular uh thread.

And you'll see two tabs uh in the uh an uh answers section. One is the support case and answers and comments. Everything under answers and comments is private to your repost and it's private within that um uh context. Whereas the support case tab everything that is posted under the support case tab is visible to the support engineer as well as the individual who has the support role permissions.

So in this case, this content is posted here. And once support response, uh you may decide to close this thread because you got the response that you are looking for and you can click on um you can click on the uh resolve this thread button. And when you click on that button, you will be asked a question if you want to kind of make this conversation private or make this public to your private community.

Meaning do you want all your developers to access this thread? In that case, you can select review and publish. If you publish, it will be available for everybody. But if you decide not to publish a resolve without publishing, then it will be available and visible only to the support role creators.

Now this thread is published and visible to everybody. That way, this knowledge can be used by your developers. Even though it's a one on one conversation between you and support this knowledge can be reused.

So that's kind of the uh last capability uh that i that i wanted to demonstrate. And um uh with that, uh you know, i i'm excited like again, uh try your private post today. It's available for free for six months and uh uh I'll leave a moment to scan the qr code and would like to thank you.

Thanks for your time again and thanks for joining us. We will be available here.