So you guys see how these forums have languished, right? There was a flurry of activity for a number of months after you opened them up, and now it's a complete dead zone. Surely you realize why?
If this isn't ringing alarm bells for your product & business teams...
Hi John,
Thank you for having taken such active part in our Education forum.
We opened the forum a little over a year ago with several purposes.
The first was that we wanted to let users of our products communicate with each other and share ideas and best practices. The sub forums we created for this are Best Practices as well as Tips & Tricks.
These sub forums never really kicked off; we believe this is because users are finding other ways to communicate and share ideas related to teaching, likely on sites that are not related to any commercial company but focus on learning in general.
The second purpose was to offer an alternative to our other ways to get technical support. We created the sub forum Technical Support for this. Judging by the number of post and threads this initiative has been very well received by our customers. Many of the cases have been very specific and have been turned into cases handled through our normal channels. We had hoped to be able to share more general tips and workarounds here and have done so whenever possible and practical.
The third purpose was to have an informal channel where customers could submit feature requests. This is the Feedback / Feature Requests sub forum where you have been the most active contributor. Judging by the number of threads and post this sub forum has not been a huge success. However, we do consider each and every input that we see here and we do take the requests into consideration when we plan the roadmap. But we will never commit to any specific dates or deadlines in the forum. This year our roadmap has one major focus area: platform support. The first priority is tablet support for students of which the first flavor will be a browser-based student module that requires no installation, the next flavor will be actual iOS and Android student apps. We see tablets flooding the school market and would like to be one of the vendors who can support his trend. The next priorities in our platform support are Terminal Services and Mac support. In addition to the extended platform support we do also want to introduce new and improved features; improved handling of thumbnails (like align to grid) and also improved send and collect files and improved chat are absolutely at the top of our list. We do hear you – and our other customers who have given us input in this area.
Finally the fourth purpose of the forum was to give us another channel to communicate information about new releases, the News & Announcements sub forum. Again, judging by the number of views this sub forum has not been entirely unsuccessful either.
I can see that from your chair it may look like we are ignoring feedback but we do carefully read every bit of feedback that we receive. Our reply will very often be that we are considering it (and we are!) but that we cannot give specific dates or releases. Please do stay an active member of the forum and we will continue to listen.
Dorte Jacobsen | Netop Product Manager for Education
Hi Dorte,
Thanks for the informative response.
I do sympathise with your position in terms of tackling specific product goals (and those do sound like worthy avenues!), and I'm certainly not expecting my particular needs to necessarily overlap yours or anyone else's. I guess I'm just coming from a different world of software development (Mac/iOS), where the teams are perhaps more agile and able to address minor issues and features more rapidly -- two months passing without being thrown a bone, so to speak, is an eternity over there, let alone two *years*.
My outlook is probably further soured a bit by the fact that this is the first (and only) app I've ever purchased in my career that charges annually for point updates. That's fine, if that's your model; it just makes it *seem* worse when all the other apps we *aren't* paying for are being constantly iterated and improved in response to feedback. I keep renewing our Netop subscription because I'm hoping that one day you'll push a release that truly improves our experience with it, but it's kind of feeling like dumping money into an insurance policy you never use, you know?
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