sharing

In the briefing room: ViVu

Posted in Business, Cody Burke, Generation, In the Briefing Room, NEW YORK, Telecommunications, Voice, collaboration, compromise, functionality, knowledge, meeting, middle, online, screen, sharing, slide, video on December 16th, 2009 by Cody Burke – Comments Off

Online collaboration is tricky business. It means many different things to different people.
For some knowledge workers, it means basic screen sharing and voice communications. For others real-time video is key. For most, however, typically deployed tools fall somewhere in the middle, in what is often a compromise of both ease of use and functionality. Indeed, [...]

A RedDot Community – This is where it’s at! & What do you want?

Posted in CMS, Partner, RedDot, RedDot Usergroup, User group, community, forum, knowledge base, sharing, wiki on November 16th, 2009 by Markus Giesen – Comments Off

WCM Community
Too many barriers to take off

Today we have a couple of different sources for support and several places to exchange ideas and knowledge or seek a helping hand. I counted so far 2-4 wikis, 2 forums, several private developer blogs, and the official knowledgebase (based on livelink) at OpenText. Open Text earlier this year launched a test community for their UK customers, partners and clients. And Paul Smith tried hard I mean really hard earlier to get some traction on the site (http://wcmcommunity-uk.opentext.com) as he participated and created the majority of some content there.

The attempt of Open Text should be welcomed & appreciated but there certainly are critic points which led me to the assumption that this attempt might fail or furthermore it already did. Why?

Real Communities should be are open – Here are too many barriers

Technical aspects

A navigation layout that switches from homepage to content pages
Unclear user interface within wiki and forum
A search that doesn’t work properly (for example search for “Pre-Executing” returns nothing but there is content)
A header that hides 50% of my page when using a (standard!) resolution of 1024*768

Social and personal ascpects

A login form to reach content or participate without even knowing what to expect. The site is trying to be a community and covering all aspects available but hides behind a login form. No one can see whats inside therefore why would I register?
I need to get approval from someone. You make me feel not welcome.
It’s too much from above. RedDot CMS lost trust during the buyout fatigue over the last 4 years and this is a try but a bad place to start.
Don’t mix marketing & support OR if you do make it clearly visible – Podcasts and Videos are mostly marketing talk. In a community I want to connect and interact, I don’t want something that feels like advertisement. If there is a new and exciting feature I want to hear about it from my partner or better another customer who is excited.
It is understood that this is a test project but communities in general should not be based on regions, Open Test is global and so is social networking
It feels wrong. The whole setup is slow, clunky and doesn’t fit together
A Community works different to this set up – A Community is not partner driven
A community creates its own dynamic but its a person driven thing and not based on faceless partners.
It appears to be another marketing platform. Marketing is not social. Marketing is one talks to many and the audience is forced meant to listen (or leave).

Conclusion

Technical – It’s really horrible
I know there are new Web 2.0 tools available from OpenText and I assume they are working better than the ones here. Don’t get me wrong they do their job but communities should run with the best available technologies and with better usability.

Social – As a community it’s not very communing with people at all
There is no easy way to join and once in I found it hard to stay long. I feel excluded and not really interested in participating here. It’s not providing a platform where I would look for support. Some index pages have dates, others don’t. The design makes me uncertain and the purpose seems not to be clear. I think Open Text wants to achieve something with the wrong tools. To achieve the best available outcome for the user means in this case that a community should be open to all. Everyone should be easily able to participate. Therefore one should be able to use latest and fitting technologies and solutions like wordpress, mediawiki and a forum software like phpBB.

Altogether
This is my personal view on this portal and looking at this site and the others available we have got a lot of sites allover the world but no site really combines everything a developer needs, a partner expects and clients deserve. Other vendors are able to set up an amazing developer network. I personally think that Open Text can’t set one up for themselves at this stage from what I’ve seen and from the current perception customers have on them.