There’s really not much indication of how any of it works from a technical standpoint and we’ve watched/listened to/read all the marketing bumph we can lay hands on without being much the wiser.
So, I suppose what I’m asking for is a bit of a technical overview of how the different pieces slot together with the rest of RX.
Not sure if this answers your question or not, but we’ve purchased the Community Marketing Solution (back in 2008 around the time they were coming out) and we use only a small, tiny fraction of what it does (RSS feed, RSS importer). Unfortunately there is no documentation on how to set things up in it, so we have not been able to use anything substantial such as the Blogs which is why we originally purchased it for. We were also under the impression we could take the rss importer, copy/modify it to import other XML files as well, unfortunately that is not the case. After discussions with Percussion, they informed us the Percussion batch impoter is outside of the solution. We’ve tried to setup calls with Percussion PSO to discuss how to go about setting some of what it claims to do (such as blogs) but those calls just don’t seem to happen.
In terms of technical, from what we can tell its not like a product that installs some new content types or samples that you can easily copy and configure/modify. Looks like you do have to create things from scratch but without documentation, samples or support on this, it has not helped us any.
There are a few component to the community marketing module:
Rss
Polls
User generated content
I’m in the process of installing them all so we can demo to clients. I’ve got as far as the user generated content which is working fine. It’s basically a web service which creates content in rhythmyx and inserts into slots.
The out of the box example is user feedback/comments. You include a form in the Rhythmyx template and when published the user fills out. When posting the form via the webservice the feedback comments are created as a comment content item (or whichever you set up) and can be assigned to any state of the workflow. The comment content item is then added to the parent page via a slot so the the content author can decide whether to publish or not. It’s a simple example but can be extended.
I echo Shane’s comments and say non of the solutions install out of the box and the documentation requires indepth knowledge of the solutions themselves which no one seems to have.
The solutions were written before Percussion went to their partner model but unfortuntely since then they havent updated them to reflect this.