Another User Conference has come and gone, and I'm back in Redlands, along with most of my colleagues. One of our first tasks after we're back in Redlands (besides catching up with backlogged emails) is to go over the feedback we received from you at the User Conference. There were a few suggestions for the Support Center web site, including:
- Promote the Customer Care site on the Support Center home page. Currently, the Support Center only has links to the Customer Service site.
- On the Support Center home page, move the Announcements section below the "Latest Additions" section.
- When offering video tutorials, podcasts or other downloadable or streamable media, list the running time. This will help users wondering whether to watch/listen now, or later.
- With the Support Center Search, add the ability to filter content by version, like the EDN web site's Search does.
- On the AnswerTree (beta), display the "Start Over" button on each page, not just on the end pages.
Some of these suggestions (like linking to the
Customer Care site) are head-slappers: why didn't
we think of that? Some of the other suggestions we'll need to consider carefully... moving the Announcements to the bottom of the home page might be a problem for some users, but perhaps the Announcements could move to the right-hand column. We'll give these and your other suggestions some thought, and I'll keep you posted as we plan future changes.
Introducing a Few Familiar Faces
Starting this week, you're going to be seeing some new faces in the Support Center News blog posts. I've invited some of my colleagues to send in snippets of info about themselves and what they do here in ESRI Support Services. These snippets will appear from time to time, whenever my colleagues have some timely Support-related information they want to share. Of course, that information will also (when appropriate) go out to the Support Center in various forms of documentation. Readers of this blog have the advantage of finding out things sooner (perhaps even before they happen), and also of getting to know the people behind the information.
So without further ado... This week two of our senior Support staff, Hamid and Mark, would like to introduce themselves. Take it away, guys!
Greetings! My name is Hamid, and I have been working in ESRI Support Services since 2005. My primary role is to serve as a technical go-to person for our support analysts, as well as to present important software bugs and enhancements to ESRI's Development Teams on behalf of everyone in the user community using our server-class products, including ArcGIS Server.
I would like to take this opportunity to let all of you know that we at ESRI are fully committed to listening to your feedback and using that information to make a change in our software. That’s right, your feedback is one of the most important sources of information for us to focus on important software enhancements and fixes. ESRI Support Services has dedicated staff who convene with the developers on regular basis to share user feedback, and this process is managed by my team, the UAG (User Advocacy Group). The take home message is: Your feedback is very important, we sincerely thank you for your candid feedback, and we would like to hear more of it to effectively make a change.
Hi, I’m Mark, the Senior Technical Lead for the SDK Support unit. SDK Support handles all programming-related issues. This includes ArcGIS Desktop, Engine, and Server, in all supported programming languages and on all operating systems, both Windows and UNIX-based.
It’s exciting to see some of the things folks are doing with ArcGIS Server as they incorporate it into their custom applications. Please be sure to check out the documentation and samples available from our EDN website,
http://edn.esri.com. The red “Code Exchange” tab will take you to the samples. Java developers, you now have your own gateway called EDN Java Central:
http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=java.gatewayFinally, here’s an article about some of the online documentation improvements for Server that have been made recently:
http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.documentation.viewDoc&PID=66&MetaID=1294I recommend periodically checking the ESRI support site as well as EDN, since the documentation is constantly evolving and improving.
Thanks, guys. That's the news for this week; next week we'll take a look at the status of Bugs Online (see last week's post for details), and perhaps an interview with the people bringing you the
Mapping Center web site. Stay tuned.