CLARiiON - Community .... any thoughts?

I would look for these three things from any Product/Tech Community.

1. Provision of a Technical Discussion/Forum. (where folks could post their questions/issues/problems realted to the product, and members should post their ideas and suggestions).

2. Provision for all the Product related info (like - Upcomming Upgrades, Major Case Studies, Whitepapers...etc)

3. Some sort of alert mechanism (which when set could send daily digests as to the updates in the community)

I could think of many more....but I think these three could be a better start, with further addtions and editions.

Thanks,

Sarwar

If you don't mind my asking for a bit of clarification first, Tarini...?

Are you talking about something separate from the Support Forums group for technical discussions on all things CLARiiON? Are you thinking a combination of the existing Support Forums with they type of content already provided in the Support by Product pages in Powerlink? Or would this be a separate Community for non-customer users and the customers would generally maintain their current activity in the Support Forums.

I guess I would just need to understand the thought behind the question a bit more before I could comment.

Hi Allen,

Sorry for the delay in responding, as you can see from my response to Sarwar above, I forgot to set up email notifications on this thread.

To answer your question, yes, we are planning to launch a community separate from the Support Forums - although we will have easy links between the two.  While the Support Forums are primarily technology-specific discussion threads, the community will be a more comprehensive area where we can share product information (e.g. tips, news, etc.), where members can have more access to the business (e.g. product management, engineering), where members can share information like best practices and problem-solving with one another.

As an example, look at the Documentum Community vs. the Documentum Support Forum.

While the primary audience for the proposed community will be customers, undoubtedly non-customers may get value from it too.

Do you visit and find beneficial other communities on ECN (or other vendor's communities) or is your activity primarily within the Support Forums?

Thanks,

Kris

Hi Sarwar,

Thanks for responding to Tarini's question; we really appreciate your thoughts. Our community will definitely have a discussion forum component, and soliciting ideas and input from members - both about the community itself and your feedback on our technologies - is something will be eager to capture.

Will links to case studies, white papers, and other such documentation that already resides on EMC.com and Powerlink be helpful?

As far as an alert mechanism, this is going to seem ironic since I failed to do it myself on this thread, but are you aware that in a community (or for a specific document or discussion) you can set email alerts to notify you of newly posted content?  You will receive individual email, though, for each new post; I don't believe the platform we use supports aggregating the information into a daily or weekly digest.  Would having a regular newsletter (emailed weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) to inform you of new content be useful?

Hey, if you have more suggestions we'd love to hear them!

Thanks again,

Kris

Sanjit,

Thank you for posting these suggestions.  Are there specific technology areas that you are most interested in getting expert information on?

Also, could you clarify your first suggestion (day-to-day challenges that a storage engineer faces in CLARiiON)?  Are you interested in getting an inside view into CLARiiON engineering or are you looking for member posts on challenges they face and how they resolved them?

You seem to be pretty active in the ECN communities; I hope we hear more from you in this area!

Thanks again,

Kris

Thanks for your comment, Allen!

As Kristine noted, this would be in addition to the CLARiiON Support Forum although there might be some minor overlap. The Support Forum's goal is to support current technical challenges experienced by customers and a sharing of how EMC and other members recommend best practices, etc regarding support issues.  I can't speak for Kristine and her team, but see this new potential community as addressing slightly different areas, not so closely tied to current support issues. For example, future desired CLARiiON enhancements, strategic discussions around best practices optimizing CLARiiON in a specific environment, and the ability to add video capabilities enabling ChalkTalks (created by members or by EMC) is a 3rd idea.

You're right, in an ideal world, these two communities would be consolidated, not just linked, and maybe ECN will be able to one day do this. But for now, we're interested in seeing if there is interest beyond product support, and identifying specifically what these interests are.

But maybe the CLARiiON Support Forum does meet this need completely?  What do other CLARiiON users and those considering CLARiiON think?  What topics would interest you and your organization in a CLARiiON community?  Where would you like to see this go?