New support option: discussion groups

In the interest of expanding the available support options for our users, we’ve created discussion groups (which can be read online, or subscribed to via email or RSS) for all of our products. The main advantage of the discussion groups is that users can speak with other users, which isn’t possible via our existing email or trouble ticket support systems.

We’ve set the groups up via Google Groups, mainly because they’ve got a really good group management system. If you have a Google account, you can sign up for each group via the web, and set your preferences (email delivery, etc.) as you wish. If you don’t have a Google account, you can only sign up via email, and you can’t set any preferences. (This page explains what you can and can’t do in Google Groups if you don’t have a Google account.)

Here are the discussion groups we’ve created (linked to their web pages), along with sign-up links for both web (Google account holders only) and email (everyone else), and a page describing the various RSS (news feeds) available for each group.

In addition, we’ve set up one more announcements-only list; we’ll use this one to announce new products, significant updates (i.e. not minor) to existing products, special sales, calls for beta testers, and other such similar news. I expect this to be a very low-volume group, perhaps one to two messages a month. Here’s the info on the announcements group:

As with our other support options, we’ll monitor everything that flows through theses lists, and respond when there’s something that requires our attention. But please, feel free to discuss things amongst yourselves, too—tips, suggested improvements, even complaints (keep things civil, please). These groups are really for your benefit as well as ours; we hope that they’ll help us improve our products, and help you get the most out of those products.

As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

One Response to “New support option: discussion groups”

  1. Tom says:

    Good idea, methinks. Now I might spam less here and more over there ;-)