Axonify Communications: How to prepare for Channels

Hey, Axonify Communications customers! Here’s an important update just for you!

Have you heard?!?! Something really powerful for nurturing frontline group engagement and gathering business insights is coming… it’s CHANNELS!

Plus, Discover’s Communities will change to FOLDERS—establishing Discover as a true resource repository—making it easier for you and your frontline to navigate articles.

These important changes are happening on April 30, 2025.

Be sure to read through to the end—there are important steps you need to take to ensure you and your teams can fully enjoy the impactful benefits of Channels!

WHAT ARE CHANNELS?

Currently, Discover Communities can contain articles that you and other administrators can create.

Discover Communities can also contain Discussions—posts from your frontline to communicate directly with others across the organization—that are tucked away within Communities, making them less obvious and easy to miss.

Here’s the spoiler! On April 30, 2025, Discussions are going to change to CHANNELS. They’ll be relocated to a section under Timeline, and will have improved functionality for even more engaging conversations thanks to:

• Video and multi-image uploading
• Reactions to individual comments
• @ mentions 
• Reward points
• Personalized notifications

(More to come on Channels as April 30, 2025 gets closer!)

WHAT ARE FOLDERS?

On April 30, 2025, Discover Communities will be called FOLDERS, have a new default icon and contain your Discover articles.

(Don’t worry! If your Communities currently have custom icons, you won’t lose these when they change to Folders on April 30, 2025! Only your Communities that use the default Community icon will change to the new default Folder icon.)

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

On April 30, 2025, these helpful changes will be automatically applied to your Axonify platform.

Channels will be seamlessly integrated into Timeline—the central hub where your frontline already views their HQ messages. By placing Channels in this highly visible location, we’re making group discussions, knowledge sharing, engagement and two-way feedback more accessible and easier to use for everyone—empowering you and your frontline to effortlessly connect and communicate.

Folders will make it easy for your frontline to quickly find the article they’re looking for without getting distracted by conversations that are happening. Discover will purely be a resource repository for articles.

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?

Just a little cleanup and prep work!

     STARTING FEBRUARY 5, 2025

If you create a new Community, you’ll designate it as either an article-only or posting-only Community using the Content Settings tab. This is so when April 30, 2025 arrives, these events can happen automatically (and totally seamlessly) for you:

• Article-only Communities will be transformed into Folders and remain in Discover
• Posting-only Communities will be transitioned over to Channels in the Timeline

     FROM NOW UNTIL APRIL 30, 2025

For your existing Communities, you should start reviewing them and look for Communities that contain a combination of articles and posts (“mixed Communities”). In the next few weeks, Axonify will share a list of these impacted Communities with you.

Mixed Communities will need to be cleaned up to make the migration of your existing Discussions over to Channels in Timeline totally seamless. This simple cleanup—to be completed from now until April 30, 2025—will enable you to truly take advantage of Channels.

Cleanup steps: 

1. Evaluate your mixed Communities. Are posts actively being used? If no, leave as is. If yes, move to the next steps.
2. Create a new Community for each of your mixed Communities; annotate the new Community with “ARTICLES” and enable articles only—keeping posts disabled.
3. Move all articles from each mixed Community to their respective new Community that’s annotated with “ARTICLES” by changing the Home Community on each article, and disabling articles for the original mixed Community.
4. Link the URL of the “ARTICLES” Communities to the post-only Communities description of their respective Communities for easy navigation and connection between the two Communities.

Watch this video or view this help article to get started!

Our team will also be sharing some resources that you can use to spread the word to ensure that everyone in your workforce has a great experience with these new changes!

     APRIL 30, 2025

Once your cleanup is complete, Discover will no longer contain Discussions because they’ll all have been transformed and relocated to Channels in Timeline. 

NOTE: If your mixed Communities aren’t cleaned up by April 30, 2025, they’ll automatically be transformed into Folders and the posts from those mixed Communities will be lost.

WHAT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS?

Your Customer Success Manager will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have, and provide any support that you need during the cleanup of your mixed Communities!

You can also reach out here in a comment if you’d like!

As April 30, 2025 gets closer, the Axonify Team will be sure to keep you updated here in the Axonify Community, through meeting touchpoints, via the Newsletter and other outlets!

Until next time!

Chelsea (Axonify Product Marketing Team)