As this blog’s Communities category will attest, I’m a big fan of these. Once they reach a sufficient number of members, they become quite valuable from a peer-to-peer help standpoint. Two DeltaV examples are in Facebook and LinkedIn. At the time of this post’s creation, the DeltaV Facebook group has 1,127 members and the DeltaV LinkedIn group has 1,668 members.
In both communities, you’ll see how-to Q & A’s, application Q & A’s, integration Q & A’s, and much more. Recruiters looking for DeltaV expertise also post opportunities in these communities.
Here’s one example that brought all this to mind. I follow the DeltaV LinkedIn community more closely because I get daily summary emails of posts that have been made over that period. If I think a product manager, industry expert, application expert, etc. around Emerson can help, I forward the email their way.
The DeltaV Facebook group does not have this email capability (at least to my knowledge), nor a direct way to subscribe to an RSS feed. With RSS, the posts flow directly into my Microsoft Outlook 2007 RSS reader. I started a post long ago, RSS Feed of Group Discussion Board? to see what the best way to be notified of new posts might be.
Mike Boudreaux, whom you might recall from many process safety and social media-related posts, suggested Page2RSS. Here’s an example of the page it creates (and its associated RSS feed) when pointed to the discussions page in the DeltaV Facebook group. This worked OK but did not provide detail of the content of the posts.
This morning, I saw a new comment to this thread by Andre Levy, a member of the DeltaV Facebook community. He created a Yahoo Pipe that allows you to enter the group ID (21266817522 for the DeltaV Group) and it creates an RSS feed for the discussions page. This RSS feed gives the subject, the first name of the author, and the content of the post in its feed.
It’s a perfect example of peers helping peers solve an issue. In this case, it was my issue. If you find this solution useful too or have other brilliant ideas, share your thoughts on this thread.
While you’re there, you just mind find some other valuable things, like a DeltaV Backup Application, developed by Jason Villamil, who is a member of the John H. Carter team. John H. Carter is one of Emerson’s local business partners in the Louisiana and central Gulf Coast area.
If you have an interest in the DeltaV system, consider joining one or both of these communities, and/or look for the DeltaV tweets in Twitter.
Update: I asked Andre Levy if I could give credit to him in this post and he gave me the OK. I’ve updated the post above to include him. Thanks for the Yahoo Pipes logic to create the DeltaV Facebook discussions RSS feed, Andre!
Update 2: Andre provided an updated RSS feed, https://feeds2.feedburner.com/fbDeltaV . I’ve updated the links above with this new feed. Thanks again, Andre!
