Forum wish list

Brad,

The Bentley Civil folks have been having meetings with users for some time on the next generation of the Civil product. You can check with your AM to find out more information. Our AM has regular round table discussions with his accounts and invites Civil representatives to discuss pros and cons and wishes. You should also look into the 2009 Bentley Roads and Bridges Conference in October as well. It is a great chance to express any wishes. The Civil developers regularly watch this group for suggestions as well. If you find something you need or want, certainly float it here. It will get noticed.

Phil Chouinard:

(at least until "v2.0"... which is currently being worked on).

 Phil - can we can test drive the beta v2.0 forum and also make comments/suggestions for it?

Phil Chouinard:

BTW, I was just reminded of one more thing regarding all this -- check out the Why should I bother to say anything? blog post (particularly the part starting with "How can you get your suggestion heard?")

I appreciate your blog post Phil and as you may have noticed I depend on the forums as my primary source of support and post regularly.

I must admit I was a bit discouraged by your response about offereing a wish list forum. My feeling is that without such a forum us end users don't have any way to express our experiences or needs in a consolidated way. While there are various avenues to present our wishes such as service tickets, user groups, and the general forums, the information is still disjointed and difficult to find, if accessible at all. Autodesk offers wish list forums as do many other product developers. Quite frequently I have encountered deficiencies in my software that have existed for years and have been surprised that support staff weren't even aware of them when I present them. This is why I feel there is a disconnect between the users and the development team somewhere. I don't know what is needed to bridge the gap, but I do believe a wishlist forum would help end users to see whether others have had similar experiences as well as any comments from the development team.

calistrat:

 

 Phil - can we can test drive the beta v2.0 forum and also make comments/suggestions for it?

Sure... when we get to that point. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done before then, though.

Phil Chouinard:

There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done before then, though.

Maybe I'm just bass ackwards, but wouldn't you typically first get user input and then do a huge amount of work? I'm just sayin'....

Phil Chouinard:

There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done before then, though.

Maybe I'm just bass ackwards, but wouldn't you typically first get user input and then do a huge amount of work? I'm just sayin'....

Oh, we definitely are going to be soliciting user input, but you just have to believe me that there is a great amount of work that needs to be done before that -- that is what we are currently looking at.

Phil,

One minute you guys say you are really close and the next you say you are so far away...... I also know you are talking to certain users out there. I strongly feel you need to open up the lines of communication to the general userand not just the CADD administrators in the big DOTs and consultancies. This comminity site seems the perfect place todo just that. One problem with just consulting with CADD Admins is many of them no long do real design work and have lost touch with what is required in todays environment.

There are many ideas out there, some may actually be good.

Brad

Hmmm... maybe I am looking at this from a different (and possibly closer) perspective, but I do not recall anyone stating (publicly or otherwise) that "v2.0" was "really close"... only that it was currently being worked on. And AFA "I also know you are talking to certain users out there", being one of the folks on "the team", I know of no instances where what I believe you think is happening is currently happening, at least not in the context of beta, alpha, pre-alpha, pre-pre-alpha, etc.

"There are many ideas out there, some may actually be good."

It seems that there are 2 issues in this thread. One about allowing a new forum for Civil wishes and one about why that is important. I certainly cannot answer to the 2.0 version of forums and from what I can tell; Phil has covered that pretty well. As far as wishes for Civil products or things you might want to see added, I stand by the fact that the Bentley Civil developers regularly watch these forums and are very receptive to requests and needs of their users. Take a chance and offer some wishes, along with justification, and you will see how well the process works.

As for CADD administrators being out of touch, I take issue with that statement. From the CADD administrators I regularly talk with, we are very involved with what our users are doing. We hold frequent meetings to find out what is working and what needs to be improved and pass that information on to Bentley. Please try not to generalize based only on your experience as it is unfair to the CA's that work hard to help their users.

As a CADD Manager who is frequently asked to put in billable hours on Projects, I have a distinct advantage. I get to use and manage both the drafting and design software.

I have been is situations where I did not have the authority to submit CR's but wanted to offer suggestions for improvements. I   frequently use this forum to put bugs in others ears to see if my idea for improvements also sounds good to others.

I (almost) always submit any CR idea as a formal CR but frequently post the same information here.  I also used to work for a DOT and I can tell you that when we (as the DOT) asked about a change, it always received a response. The answer was not always yes, but it frequently resulted in that suggestion being added to the product at some point down the line. A formal CR submission will also always solicit a response - something that occasionally does not happen here.

Putting the CR in the subject line is the most direct way of indicating a post is a "wish list" item and is fewer characters, leaving more room for other information. I'd say it is equally important to specify the product in the subject, since this forum deals with MX, InRoads and GEOPAK. (Power Civil has apparently gotten a bit more cloudy, as there are now two flavors of that product.)

Finally, it is also good to specify version numbers since older bugs have frequently been stomped out by newer releases, but the version info is more appropriate for the body of the post than the subject line.