Tag: Survey

Help us improve the ecosystem: Take the Alfresco Community 2013 Survey

Surveying by IamNotUniqueHopefully, you find the Alfresco community team and our company in general extremely approachable. My perception is that people aren’t afraid to reach out and give us feedback directly, which is exactly how we like it. But I think it is important for us to stop and ask for specific feedback on areas we are tracking on a regular basis. That’s why we do a survey of the Alfresco community every year.

So if you are involved at all with Alfresco, whether you are an Alfresco One subscriber, a partner, an employee, or a Community Edition user, please take 15 minutes to complete the survey.

We’ll use your feedback to make the Alfresco ecosystem a better place. If you’ve participated in the past, I hope you’ve seen some of your suggestions become a reality as we continuously improve over time. I’m hoping to consolidate the feedback and report on the results during my session at this year’s Alfresco Summit.

As a small way to say thanks for your time, we’re going to randomly draw two prize winners from valid, completed surveys. Each lucky winner will receive a $250 USD gift card from Amazon (see survey for contest rules and details).

Take the 2012 Alfresco Community Survey and Win $250

It’s that time again, folks. Time to see how we did over the past year and what corrections we need to make in the year ahead to keep the Alfresco community on track.

Whether you are an Enterprise subscriber or someone who works with Community Edition, I need as many people in the ecosystem as possible to take the survey.

Why bother? Because we care what you have to say. Seriously. Many of the things we’ve done in the community over the past year have been a direct result of this survey. You told us, we listened, we executed. Now it is time to find out how effective that execution was and to see what we need to do for the coming year.

So please do take 15 minutes to tell us how we’re doing. And if the “help us help you” reason isn’t enough, two lucky winners will walk away with $250 Amazon Gift Certificates.

You have until June 15 to take the survey.

Thanks ahead of time for your feedback and good luck!

2011 Alfresco Community Survey Results

We had over 1400 people from 70 different countries participate in this year’s survey on the state of the Alfresco community. I appreciate the time each of you took to give me your feedback. There were a lot of great ideas submitted. If you did participate, I hope you were also able to watch last week’s webinar where I outlined the plan for the community for the rest of the year. (If not, check out the recording or the slides). Hopefully, you recognized some of your feedback in the plan.

As promised, I’ve compiled a presentation with the survey results and uploaded it to slideshare. I’ve put some light analysis and insights into the deck along with charts showing the survey results. I welcome other insights you may have after you take a look.

In case you are wondering, we did give away the $250 Alfresco gift cards. The lucky respondents hailed from India and Colombia. Despite what you might think from my recent travel schedule, I did not deliver these in person, although that would have been fun.

I want to do this again next year. I think it is an important input into the community planning process. And, hopefully, we’ll be able to see the fruits of our labor in real, measurable terms when we compare subsequent surveys to prior years.

Forrester says 2010 looks good for ECM

Forrester has released the results from its 2009 Global Enterprise Content Management Online Survey. Here are a few of the things that jumped out at me…

72% of respondents plan on increasing their ECM investments in the coming year. That’s certainly good news. Of those increasing their investment, the big drivers are content sharing, compliance, search, and automation, which are all typical reasons to roll out a content management solution.

When asked to list the vendors that supply them with ECM solutions, 63% of respondents included Microsoft with EMC a distant second at 35%. (I kind of expected that Microsoft number to be higher). OpenText/Vignette (29%) and IBM (28%) were clustered right around there with a third clump forming around Autonomy/Interwoven (19%), Oracle (17%), and Alfresco (14%). The only other open source ECM players explicitly named were KnowledgeTree and Nuxeo, each with 1%. Almost a third of respondents also listed “Other, please specify” but Forrester doesn’t provide the list of write-ins. I assume it is a bunch of small, niche or homegrown solutions because the usual suspects were listed as explicit choices. Still, this chart and the one following that shows that nearly 3/4 of respondents have 2 or more ECM solutions in-house confirms what we’ve seen in our Optaros clients: Most people haven’t settled on a single ECM provider.

A little more than 1 in 4 of respondents were unsatisfied with their ECM solution. Of those, 41% blamed the solution itself as failing to “live up to expectations” followed by the usual grab bag of non-technical reasons IT projects fail. I would have liked to see a follow-up that dissected the various ways the solution fell short. Was it not able to do something you thought it was going to be able to do? Was stability an issue? Scale? Bad support experience? Or was it just that the beans you were told were magic turned out to be just plain old beans?

As my college stats teacher was fond of saying, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics,” so take all of this with a grain of salt.