What if we opened up the Support Forums (read-only) to the whole internet?

i just wanted to comment that about 2 years ago we had a discussion where some members wanted to force other members to use their real name. I was against that because of privacy issues in case these forums were ever go public.  Hmmm ..it's like i knew ?

Probably not a big deal but in hardware forums we often refer to documentation that's available on PowerLink so unless people viewing specific threads have full PowerLink accounts it will be worthless to them and they won't be able to say anything about that either. VMware documentation is available to the whole world.

That's a really interesting point.  Not only are our manuals "behind the wall" but so are our knowledgebase solutions and some other things like White Papers.

Do you think that this would make the overall experience too much of a tease ("here's some info, but for more you need to be a customer") and therefore not worth it?  Or would it create enough interest for those users to subsequently login through Powerlink?

We should have easy access to as much info as possible, but we don't want to open the door into a negative Support Forum experience.

Erich,

Having information searchable by Google and other engines is incredibly important.

There's way too much information to casually browse, so seach becomes the efficient way to find relevant content.

When people are looking for information, a good portion of them will try a global search engine as their very first step.

• Having Support Forums content featured prominently in the results would be good for the member or visitor, and good exposure for our forums and the community as a whole.

I had a conversation with the manager of a developer network from another company.

• He mentioned that their analysis showed close to 90% of all the page hits were referred from search engines.
• People were not actively "going" to his forum, they were "winding up" there (happily) by using a link in the search results.

So, I believe it's all about getting the information out there, and making it as easy to discover as possible.

Thanks for raising this topic.

I have to admit that my first reaction to this is negative. Try as I might though I can't quite pin down why I feel vaguely uncomfortable about this.

On the surface it seems reasonable to open up the content (Read Only) to the public. They are not getting any proprietary information, and they still have to be customers with Powerlink accounts to get to the good stuff and participate. Realistically, anyone who is concerned about previously written content becoming public should probably review their personal criteria for what to post. I'm sure there are circumstances I have not considered which would make that statement seem harsh, but in general...

So, in the end (although I will continue to think about it)I think that opening up the Forums on a limited basis is a reasonable move. It seems to be good for the public, good for the Forums Community, good for EMC...   I'm still trying to figure out why it doesn't sit just right, but since I can't put my finger on it I can't really fight it rationally

EMC has prided itself on doing a lot on behalf of  the Customer requiring Support, and doing it well. But the World has changed. So has our product offering.

Customers want and in many cases need to help themselves more and more. The technologies and cultural changes brought and facilitated by Social Media and Web 2.0 has moved the goal posts. It's happened and is continuing to happen so fast that it's seems hard to keep up with. It is to some degree a cultural shift for some. But it's one worth doing. Customers expect to have easy access to technical information.

But as stated from previous posters, we should not appear to be opening up content to have another gate shut in front of people seeking information.

We need to ensure we strike the right balance of access in favour of our customers and partners.

From my perspective (Support) I would be for opening the forums/documentation/knowledgebase content to the web, it would be invaluable for case-deflection from the support center, remove alot of the repeated cases we get for reletively simple issues, leaving more complex cases for the Support Center to deal with.

Imagine the cost-saving for EMC if they could remove the 'noise' of low severity, documentation/procedural cases that customers open today.

"Noise", Conor?

Do you realize that was your "outside voice"? *lol*

Just kidding though. I know exactly what you mean and I'm willing to bet you're right on the reduction of easier calls. Of course that could negatively impact your time-to-resolve statistics too :-)

Hi,

I definitely see the advantage of having the Forums searchable/reachable from Google, no doubt about that.

The "tease" part is something that have to be evaluated, but I don't think that this will become a major problem.

What's concerning me personally is the fact that the Forums, and all the 10.000s of replies, now are getting public to simply everyone.

I do also remember the discussion we had a couple of years ago, about using "real" names, and I've liked the idea of "knowing" the people

I'm communicating with.

Is there any possibility to keep the poster identiy hidden, as long as you access the threads from the outside?

That would definitely be sufficient to me.

Regards

Jørg

Hmmm.... good point Jorg,

That would definately make me feel more comfortable about it. If all the info on the posters could be hidden (especially name and avatar image) that would be great.

Good point dynamox

I suppose you could interpret what I said that way, but it wasn't exactly how I meant it. At the time I didn't really consider the possibility that the content could be made available without the user info attached (and maybe it isn't a possibility). I was thinking more along the lines of someone worrying that something they had previously written becoming visible to a much wider audience than originally intended. Part of our business Code of Conduct includes warnings that we should assume anything committed to paper, web, e-mail, voice mail, etc. may go beyond the intended audience and to ensure that the "tone", wording, and general content take that into consideration. That doesn't really change even if we can hide the identity of the poster (at least from the general public).

Sorry if I wasn't as clear as I intended the first time around. Hopefuly this makes more sense now.

The main point is that I most probably never would have started to post anyhing here, if it had been public all the way.

out of curiosity why is that ?

Hi dynamox,

Afaik, it hasn't to do anything about WHAT I've been posting.

So far, I've a couple of thousands of replies, and most of them aren't of that sort that

they can be made public

On the other hand, I'm extremely aware of what I do post/write on the public internet.

Most probably old fashioned, but nothing to do about THAT.

The main point is that I most probably never would have started to post anyhing here,

if it had been public all the way. Switching to public now, makes me feel a bit uneasy,

that's all.

Regards

Jørg

Hi,

this is of course a good question

I'm simply not comfortable with posting anything to an unknown amount of people (=whole internet),

especially when you can't predict how the things you say/write, are going to be used.

Posting in a internal forum, with a limited number of members, connected by a professional interest,

appears to be much more appealing.

To be honest, I'm not at all comfortable with the fact that literally anyone can google my name, and evaluate all the

posts I've been writing throughout the years.

Old fashioned? Maybe, or most likely

Regards

Jørg