We use our product updates section as a full Updates blog with news related to our product, community, documentation, training, and product-adjacent resources.
Company news and PR lives on the main company website, but the most end-user / community member relevant news is via our (product) Updates blog.
IMO, the best use cases for a separate community news category are:
- If community news needs to be private, but product news does not (separate permissions for each)
- If you have many products and want to leverage the product areas for filtering the product updates blog
But I prefer the consolidated updates approach that we’re using.
That second bullet point is the only downside, the filter mechanism for the Product Updates blog is the same Product Areas that are used for Ideation. So if you’re using Ideas and you want different products or features to be options in the Idea collection, those same Product Areas are your options for filtering the Product Updates blog (or you can hide the filter widget).
We don’t use Ideation any more, but when we did we took the opposite approach. Product Areas were configured for our (product) Updates blog:
- Product
- Community
- Documentation
- Training
Then, we marketed that you could also submit ideas for the community or new documentation/training resources. It wasn’t really used for that purpose, but it was a fine “we’re open to your ideas and feedback” message. Eventually we changed our product ideas intake and so we no longer use the out-of-the-box Ideation feature, leaving the Product Areas used only for filtering the Updates blog.
