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Webinar and Community Feedback
J L Weis, modifié il y a 14 années.
Webinar and Community Feedback
Junior Member Publications: 44 Date d'inscription: 17/06/09 Publications récentes
Unsolicited Webinar Feedback "LIFERAY PORTAL LIVE: See v5.2 in action." (+ forums and wikis)
Hey Liferay.
First, I am a huge advocate of Liferay. After trying to build my web app in a variety of ways with a variety of friends and contractors, I have choosen Liferay. It meets all my needs. I am placing a HUGE bet on the promise and future of Liferay. My success is riding on whether or not Liferay is what it says it is. When I reach success, Liferay and my App Hosting provider will benefit in many ways.
Why I love Liferay. It is easy for a business guy (me) to understand. It's a breeze to deploy, and the community of users on Liferay's forum and wiki are astounding. A few of my most trusted engineers have strongly recommended that I use Liferay. I understand the technology. I respect their opinions.
But I have a few concerns. Please keep my respect for Liferay in mind while reading the following, unsolicited feedback. I am sending via email, but i'll post it to the forum too.
General Webinar Feedback "LIFERAY PORTAL LIVE: See v5.2 in action"
1. 30 minutes is not enough time. 90 minutes would be more appropriate. If you are having trouble with # of Participants, you should a.) do these webinars less frequently and b.) talk to your marketing department and hold them accountable for bringing more folks to the table. This is an estimate, but I think you responded to 15-20% of the questions I raised.
2. Provide a variety of business implementations, more real world, enterprise examples. I can't remember what you demonstrated during the webinar, but it seemed awfully niche, something about country cottages. I would have preferred to see how e-commerce is enabled, or social communities where user base is > 10 are deployed, or the power of various plugins.
3. When discussing future versions, show the audience the Roadmap. When is 5.3 expected to be released, confidence level of release date, what it contains, what are the obstacles, what are priorities? 5.4? 5.5?
4. Cut the humor. If I am looking for a laugh or a witty presenter, I have better places to go. You should script the main points, bullet them, and practice sounding like you're not reading from a script, practice authenticity.
5. Get feedback. What I am providing is unsolicited. You should explicitly ask the audience to rate and review your webinars. Not everyone will participate, but the few that do, will give you guidance on your strengths and weaknesses.
6. Know your Audience! Let the Marketing department lead the discussion. Let the Engineering department engineer stuff. The custodians should be sweeping. In other words, Engineers make poor presenters. They speak in their own vernacular, they are rightfully caught up in their own worlds. The Marketing and Communications teams should be the tailors. They should know what to say to certain audiences assuming zero knowledge. If the audience is comprised of business individuals who make business decisions, talk business. If the audience is comprised of senior engineers, talk about the portal.properties file and the difference between the ext and the sdk environments.
The Liferay webinar (a few unanswered questions):
Q: how does liferay integrate with Jasper reports
Why I Asked: This is really important to me. My web app needs the most advanced open source graphing and reporting mechanism. The forum suggests there is a relation to Liferay and Jasper, but I have not seen the instructions.
Q: does liferay support marketing leads management and sales oppty management?
Why I Asked: My web app requires an enterprise Contact/Lead/Sales application in the backend. The behavioral data I plan to collect will lead to Revenue. Knowing that you have plans in 5.3 to integrate with SFDC is not sufficient. I need to know the details behind those plans and the likelihood that they will be achieved
Q: I haven't been able to download Liferay 5.2.3 SE from your site, I get an error.
Why I Asked: For at least 36 hours, the "Download" link from your home page wasn't working. This is a credibility issue. It could be seen as an indicator of the timeliness of response to systematic problems. It's just a link. But it concerned me that 1. you avoided the question on the webinar and 2. I had to "ALL CAP" a note on the forum to get a response. If I were just visiting for the first time, I would have never returned
Q: Can we see roadmap and dates for 5.3 and beyond
Why I Asked: Same reason provided above. The fact that I haven't gotten a response either on the forum or the webinar, gives me minor ulcers.
The Liferay Forum and Wikis:
1. Please read http://tr.im/rVfj (a post on the forum) This issue has been increasing in importance. Someone needs to clean up, and reorganize the site. Navigating and searching the forum is burdensome on the user. I have tried to look for my answer on the site before every post. I found related topics, I found outdated (4.x) responses, but never found what I was looking for.
2. There was a forum post that had a significant number of reads and replies, from 2007, marked as "sticky" It had to do with a "Bounty Program" Over the last 48 months, a ton of folks replied in favor of this idea. What happened?
3. The Wikis and Admin Guides need some copyediting. Someone, who natively speaks English, should be solely responsible for testing the validity of the instructions, then re-writing in an intuitive and easy to understand way. There was one example about modifying the portal.properties file and creating the portal-ext.properties file. Several generous community members attempted to assist. They were giving me workarounds and hacks, that were effective. Eventually, someone told me the proper way.
4. Take a look at another example. http://tr.im/rVk7 These are the inaccurate instructions for removing 7Cogs. Notice the thread that follows. The community had to fix the errors in the instructions. That really should happen. You're the experts.
5. Trust the community for supporting users BUT don't rely on the community. If a non-Liferay staffer answers a question, verify and validate.
6. Finally, Liferay employees and accredited partners should have some type of badge or title next to their forum responses. This would go a LONG way for me to ensure that I was getting an official answer, or a generous estimate. There are 3 community members that have built their credibility through accurate responses. The rest of the responses I have to take with a grain of salt. Presently, all I see are Star Wars references, which are cool, don't misinterpret me.
7. Take a look at wikipedia's list of "comparison of web application frameworks" http://tr.im/rUm2 Why is Liferay not on the list? Even though, you should have some comparative document, easily accessible to prospects that highlights why Liferay is better than the rest. The non-technical people I talk with suggest Drupal or Joomla! The bookstore I went to last night had many books on Drupal and Joomla! It almost appears that you are trying to keep a secret.
And finally, please linkup with me on linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jweis
my email addr is j@wattmonkey.com
Hey Liferay.
First, I am a huge advocate of Liferay. After trying to build my web app in a variety of ways with a variety of friends and contractors, I have choosen Liferay. It meets all my needs. I am placing a HUGE bet on the promise and future of Liferay. My success is riding on whether or not Liferay is what it says it is. When I reach success, Liferay and my App Hosting provider will benefit in many ways.
Why I love Liferay. It is easy for a business guy (me) to understand. It's a breeze to deploy, and the community of users on Liferay's forum and wiki are astounding. A few of my most trusted engineers have strongly recommended that I use Liferay. I understand the technology. I respect their opinions.
But I have a few concerns. Please keep my respect for Liferay in mind while reading the following, unsolicited feedback. I am sending via email, but i'll post it to the forum too.
General Webinar Feedback "LIFERAY PORTAL LIVE: See v5.2 in action"
1. 30 minutes is not enough time. 90 minutes would be more appropriate. If you are having trouble with # of Participants, you should a.) do these webinars less frequently and b.) talk to your marketing department and hold them accountable for bringing more folks to the table. This is an estimate, but I think you responded to 15-20% of the questions I raised.
2. Provide a variety of business implementations, more real world, enterprise examples. I can't remember what you demonstrated during the webinar, but it seemed awfully niche, something about country cottages. I would have preferred to see how e-commerce is enabled, or social communities where user base is > 10 are deployed, or the power of various plugins.
3. When discussing future versions, show the audience the Roadmap. When is 5.3 expected to be released, confidence level of release date, what it contains, what are the obstacles, what are priorities? 5.4? 5.5?
4. Cut the humor. If I am looking for a laugh or a witty presenter, I have better places to go. You should script the main points, bullet them, and practice sounding like you're not reading from a script, practice authenticity.
5. Get feedback. What I am providing is unsolicited. You should explicitly ask the audience to rate and review your webinars. Not everyone will participate, but the few that do, will give you guidance on your strengths and weaknesses.
6. Know your Audience! Let the Marketing department lead the discussion. Let the Engineering department engineer stuff. The custodians should be sweeping. In other words, Engineers make poor presenters. They speak in their own vernacular, they are rightfully caught up in their own worlds. The Marketing and Communications teams should be the tailors. They should know what to say to certain audiences assuming zero knowledge. If the audience is comprised of business individuals who make business decisions, talk business. If the audience is comprised of senior engineers, talk about the portal.properties file and the difference between the ext and the sdk environments.
The Liferay webinar (a few unanswered questions):
Q: how does liferay integrate with Jasper reports
Why I Asked: This is really important to me. My web app needs the most advanced open source graphing and reporting mechanism. The forum suggests there is a relation to Liferay and Jasper, but I have not seen the instructions.
Q: does liferay support marketing leads management and sales oppty management?
Why I Asked: My web app requires an enterprise Contact/Lead/Sales application in the backend. The behavioral data I plan to collect will lead to Revenue. Knowing that you have plans in 5.3 to integrate with SFDC is not sufficient. I need to know the details behind those plans and the likelihood that they will be achieved
Q: I haven't been able to download Liferay 5.2.3 SE from your site, I get an error.
Why I Asked: For at least 36 hours, the "Download" link from your home page wasn't working. This is a credibility issue. It could be seen as an indicator of the timeliness of response to systematic problems. It's just a link. But it concerned me that 1. you avoided the question on the webinar and 2. I had to "ALL CAP" a note on the forum to get a response. If I were just visiting for the first time, I would have never returned
Q: Can we see roadmap and dates for 5.3 and beyond
Why I Asked: Same reason provided above. The fact that I haven't gotten a response either on the forum or the webinar, gives me minor ulcers.
The Liferay Forum and Wikis:
1. Please read http://tr.im/rVfj (a post on the forum) This issue has been increasing in importance. Someone needs to clean up, and reorganize the site. Navigating and searching the forum is burdensome on the user. I have tried to look for my answer on the site before every post. I found related topics, I found outdated (4.x) responses, but never found what I was looking for.
2. There was a forum post that had a significant number of reads and replies, from 2007, marked as "sticky" It had to do with a "Bounty Program" Over the last 48 months, a ton of folks replied in favor of this idea. What happened?
3. The Wikis and Admin Guides need some copyediting. Someone, who natively speaks English, should be solely responsible for testing the validity of the instructions, then re-writing in an intuitive and easy to understand way. There was one example about modifying the portal.properties file and creating the portal-ext.properties file. Several generous community members attempted to assist. They were giving me workarounds and hacks, that were effective. Eventually, someone told me the proper way.
4. Take a look at another example. http://tr.im/rVk7 These are the inaccurate instructions for removing 7Cogs. Notice the thread that follows. The community had to fix the errors in the instructions. That really should happen. You're the experts.
5. Trust the community for supporting users BUT don't rely on the community. If a non-Liferay staffer answers a question, verify and validate.
6. Finally, Liferay employees and accredited partners should have some type of badge or title next to their forum responses. This would go a LONG way for me to ensure that I was getting an official answer, or a generous estimate. There are 3 community members that have built their credibility through accurate responses. The rest of the responses I have to take with a grain of salt. Presently, all I see are Star Wars references, which are cool, don't misinterpret me.
7. Take a look at wikipedia's list of "comparison of web application frameworks" http://tr.im/rUm2 Why is Liferay not on the list? Even though, you should have some comparative document, easily accessible to prospects that highlights why Liferay is better than the rest. The non-technical people I talk with suggest Drupal or Joomla! The bookstore I went to last night had many books on Drupal and Joomla! It almost appears that you are trying to keep a secret.
And finally, please linkup with me on linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jweis
my email addr is j@wattmonkey.com
Brian Chan, modifié il y a 14 années.
RE: Webinar and Community Feedback
Liferay Master Publications: 753 Date d'inscription: 05/08/04 Publications récentes
Hey J,
Thank you so much for the feedback. You hit straight to the point many of the things I've wanted to see improved at Liferay regarding marketing. I'll make sure your points are read through by our team.
The only advice I won't take is the LinkedIn part since I don't really use that service. But, feel free to email me directly. I'm at brian.chan at liferay.com.
Thank you so much for the feedback. You hit straight to the point many of the things I've wanted to see improved at Liferay regarding marketing. I'll make sure your points are read through by our team.
The only advice I won't take is the LinkedIn part since I don't really use that service. But, feel free to email me directly. I'm at brian.chan at liferay.com.
Lisa Simpson, modifié il y a 14 années.
RE: Webinar and Community Feedback
Liferay Legend Publications: 2034 Date d'inscription: 05/03/09 Publications récentes
I have to add that we put in a request for pricing for your Enterprise edition and it took days for someone to get back us. We put the request in on Monday and didn't hear from anyone until Thursday. That's not very professional when someone is actually TRYING to make a purchase from you.
I don't know what's going on but it shouldn't be that hard for someone to respond to an email.
I don't know what's going on but it shouldn't be that hard for someone to respond to an email.
Ed Chung, modifié il y a 14 années.
RE: Webinar and Community Feedback
New Member Publications: 3 Date d'inscription: 20/06/06 Publications récentes
Lisa,
I apologize for the late response to your inquiry. We're usually very good about responding to all sales inquiries within the first 24 hours, but there are some that slip through the cracks.
Have you received the pricing information you were looking for? Let me know if you have any questions regarding our product or services. You can reach me at edwin.chung@liferay.com.
Best,
Ed
I apologize for the late response to your inquiry. We're usually very good about responding to all sales inquiries within the first 24 hours, but there are some that slip through the cracks.
Have you received the pricing information you were looking for? Let me know if you have any questions regarding our product or services. You can reach me at edwin.chung@liferay.com.
Best,
Ed