Proposal to Merge CoCreate User Forum with PTC/USER Portal Site

[John Scheffel]

I have started discussions with the people who manage the PTC/USER web site about merging the CoCreate User Forum into that site. Before we go any further I wanted get some feedback from the people who follow this forum because this decision will affect all of you.

Before you post or vote, I would encourage you to checkout the PTC/User forum at:

http://portal.ptcuser.org/


I have a few concerns about merging with that site.

You must register and login to access the PTC/USER forums. It does not allow unregistered viewing as this forum does. I typically see about 10 people viewing this forum for every registered member who is currently logged in.
The software they are using (Socius) seems to offer much more than forums, but I don't think the forum portion is as sophisticated as the vBulletin software which we use. The Socius interface is pretty basic and plain, but it does seem to have all the essential features that most people use.
As for me, I don't mind administering this forum, but I also wouldn't mind giving the responsibility to someone else. So I can go either way, but this forum is for the CoCreate user community and I wanted to get your input.

If you care one way or the other please vote and post any comments in this thread. You don't need to be registered or logged in to vote.

[clausb]

A side-effect of the requirement to log in for access to the forums is that Google and other search engines don't index the site, or at least not the forum parts of it. This is not a big problem for those who already know and frequent the forums, but it makes it a little harder for others to find the forum and get help with problems.

See the attachment for the current list of public discussion groups at the PTC/USER portal.

Just my 2 Euro cents,

Claus

[John Scheffel]

Just my 2 Euro cents
Which is worth a lot more that 2 USA cents these days. :D

I hadn't thought about the searching aspect, but that's a good point. I don't know how many people have found this forum from Google and other web searches, but I would guess that is how most people find it since there aren't many other possiblities. A solution might be to make sure that some CoCreate keywords are attached to the PTC/USER portal home page so that web searches will lead people to it.

Another concern is how the CoCreate forums would be added. I wouldn't want to see all the topics lumped into a single CoCreate forum on the PTC/USER site, but don't know how many CoCreate Forums they would be willing to add. As far as I can tell Socius doesn't support categories or subforums, at least the PTC/USER forum doesn't have any at this time.

[clausb]

Another concern is how the CoCreate forums would be added. I wouldn't want to see all the topics lumped into a single CoCreate forum on the PTC/USER site, but don't know how many CoCreate Forums they would be willing to add. As far as I can tell Socius doesn't support categories or subforums, at least the PTC/USER forum doesn't have any at this time.

I guess we could lose some of our discussion groups without causing too much harm - if you look at the stats, you'll find that only 6 discussion forums have had a significant amount of traffic over the years: CoCreate Modeling (3531 posts), Customization (1684), Annotation (1603), CoCreate Drafting (1213), Data Management (830), Enhancement Requests (401). Oh, and the archives are important as well, of course. I'd definitely want to keep at least those discussion forums.

On the search engine topic: Even if we spice up the PTC/USER portal so that Google finds it more easily, we still have that registration hurdle for new and casual users. IMHO, making registration mandatory for posting is fine, but everybody should be able to read the forums without registering.

So my opinion is that we should explore if we can sort out these technical and organizational issues - and then we can (and should) make an informed decision.

Claus

[May Kung]

The biggest turnoff for me would be mandatory registration to view the forum. That's the main reason I haven't bothered registering on the SolidWorks forum, since even though there *might* be stuff I'd like to read, I really have no way of knowing until I go through the registration process. I'm a member of enough fora that I don't want to add another unless I'm sure it's worth my time.

[John Scheffel]

Another thing that concerns me about the PTC portal is that it exposes your Email address. With vBulletin you can choose your login name and no one can see your Email address except administrators. This provides some protection from being added to even more spam lists. The PTC portal uses your Email address as your login. When members subscribe to a forum they receive an Email listing all the new posts including the Email address of the poster. See the attached GIF which is a screen shot of an Email I received after subscribing to the "Pro/Engineer CAD" forum (names and Emails changed to protect the innocent).

I guess you could argue that this is much less of a concern on the PTC portal because people must register to view and subscribe, but I was surprised to see poster's Email addresses included in the subscription updates.

[coroto]

I share many of the concerns already voiced by others here. In many ways I think our existing setup is probably better. However, from my impressions at the PTC/User event it seems that PTC management considers the PTC/User organization, and the specific technical committees which also participate in the PTC portal, to be a very important part of its connection to the user base. They participate in the discussions there and that is the place they will expect to listen to users' issues.

So, it may be that if we really want the attention of PTC and to be full participants in the PTC universe, we just have to be assimilated. Or at least, despite the specific issues raised by others about the relative merits of vBulletin vs. Socius and so forth, it may just be better to join rather than fight.

Then again, maybe we can convince THEM to join US!!! :)

[clausb]

So, it may be that if we really want the attention of PTC and to be full participants in the PTC universe, we just have to be assimilated. Or at least, despite the specific issues raised by others about the relative merits of vBulletin vs. Socius and so forth, it may just be better to join rather than fight.


Excellent point. For this user group, it will certainly be helpful to make sure you have all the right connections into PTC, and PTC/USER is one way to achieve this.

While this user group will probably want to be associated with PTC/USER in some way, this doesn't have to mean we'd have to give up this forum and website. For instance, the CoCreate user group could become a member of PTC/USER, and have them link to this forum for CoCreate-specific discussions. (Their only CoCreate forum has two or three messages right now...)

So there are two areas of discussions with PTC/USER:

Some form of association with them
Technical and organizational discussions around the forum sites

[Wolfgang]

A forum which is closed for non registered user does hide it's information. :(

Such a forum does not give the possibility to potential visitors to see what's in. That's bad. And when registering they are asking for a lot of things. I should give e.g. my phone number (??) after they have been giving me such less information about the contents? Such a register-process want to be fooled and they are!

I don't like that way. Privacy is important.


To have a first look I felt forced to use a fake account! That's a bad start and not a good 'welcome' to new users. :(

ONCE you are registered and logged in the situation differs (it's "edit profile"):

It looks like
* You can change your user name (so not using the email address any more)
* there's a private and a public email address
* detailed address information is NOT required any more
* detail phone number information is NOT required any more

In addition there are 2 check boxes:
* Allow users to view address information
* Allow users to view phone information
IMHO it's not a good idea to have them checked on by default.

which email address will be used now for the notification mails you, John, received, I can not tell about.

EDIT: I found i a little bit later:
Note: Only your Public Email will be displayed to other users. Your Private Email is where all communications (including listserv posts, and file download links) will be sent.

[Wolfgang]

The PTC portal uses your Email address as your login.


This is not true! As I figured out in the meantime. But it's not obvious. :o

Once you registered. You'll see a window - get an email with written:
Your initial username is: ...
I stumbled about the "initial"!

When logging in you can later change your USERNAME in the profile. So the username is not unique during the "life" of your user account. This is quiet unusual (I assume internally all is linked by the (5 digit) user id, same as we here in VBulletin have a user id, which is invisible most of the time)

After changing your user name your email address will not be shown at those places where USERname is displayed (hopefully)

For the public email address.... hmmm.. what will happen when this address will get invalid? :rolleyes:

Summary: you can hide your email address. But you have to figure out how to and and you have to do some manually entries.

for registered users of ptcuser.org only: see 32608 (http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/fo/st/thread=32608) for some (more) information. There's also a PDF file available : goto Category/Topic: PTC/USER Announcements / PTC/USER Profiles, Thread Id: 23166

[Wolfgang]

Then again, maybe we can convince THEM to join US!!! :)

This might be hard to do ;) , because PTC/USER (http://portal.ptcuser.org) are using Socious Tools (http://socious.com/solutions.php) for less than one year (http://socious.com/press_20070807.php) now.
"User Group of over 15,000 Members Using Socious Communication Suite"

www.cocreateusers.org has 1012 registered users for now. Since we don't have to sign in just for reading it's hard to count how many people are active. Nevertheless,
during the last 365 days 380 users signed in.
308 users posted more than 5 times.
433 of all registered users never ever wrote a posting.
there have been 181 new registered users during the last 365 days (the PE version might have an impact here)

these numbers were collected on 29jun2008 with normal user rights

[John Scheffel]

Thanks to everyone for posting. Lots of good information.

(Their only CoCreate forum has two or three messages right now...)
Where is the CoCreate forum in the PTC/USER portal? I couldn't find it.

I'm hoping they won't setup any CoCreate forums until we decide what to do about merging this forum. One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion. In my opinion that is the worst option for the user community because people will have to post in both forums to get maximum exposure and follow both forums.

ONCE you are registered and logged in the situation differs (it's "edit profile"):

It looks like
* You can change your user name (so not using the email address any more)
* there's a private and a public email address
* detailed address information is NOT required any more
* detail phone number information is NOT required any more

In addition there are 2 check boxes:
* Allow users to view address information
* Allow users to view phone information
IMHO it's not a good idea to have them checked on by default.

While it is good that the portal allows you to change your login name and make your info more private, I would agree that the default should be maximum privacy. I also think the portal should prompt for a non-Email user name at registration time instead of expecting people to figure out that they can change it later.

So far not many votes. Of the 12 "No" votes, 6 came from guests (people not logged in). Not too surprising since this change would require that they register. vBulletin has an option to broadcast an Email to all registered users but I don't think I have ever used it. Maybe it's time to give it a try and see if we get more response.

[clausb]

Where is the CoCreate forum in the PTC/USER portal? I couldn't find it.


You're right, there is none. I got this confused with PTC's own user forums ( http://www.ptc.com/forums/ ).


One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion.

Yup - we've got enough fragmentation already.


So far not many votes. Of the 12 "No" votes, 6 came from guests (people not logged in). Not too surprising since this change would require that they register.


One of them was mine - for some reason, I wasn't logged in when voting, but noticed it too late, sorry.

I voted 'no' because I think we need to sort out the aforementioned glitches and questions first, not because I'm fundamentally opposed to merging discussion forums.

Claus

[Wolfgang]

I'm hoping they won't setup any CoCreate forums until we decide what to do about merging this forum. One thing I don't want is this forum and the PTC/USER forum competing for CoCreate discussion. In my opinion that is the worst option
full agreement!

One thing to clarify is to get known whether PTC/USER would accept a 'no' of the majority of the cocreateusers.org - users ? Sometimes the wording sounds like "we are the one and only PTC forum". I don't like that, but it's more a personal feeling.

vBulletin has an option to broadcast an Email to all registered users but I don't think I have ever used it. Maybe it's time to give it a try and see if we get more response.
Yes. it looks like its worth to figure out this possibility.

One remark on the votes: If people are able to vote without logged in.. may be there are also registered users among them... (there ARE :D)

-----------------------
For your information:

some remarks about the german speaking forum (for those of you german is too difficult ;-) )

http://cad.de
"With currently 83835 registered users CAD.de is the biggest and most active german speaking Community for CAD-CAM-CAE and EDM/PDM/PLM users and people interested in."

CAD.de covers various CAx products. -> http://www.cad.de/forenindex.shtml This is just the CAD index.. there are more on http://CAD.de

There are 6 forums for (former) PTC (http://ww3.cad.de/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro&showall=1&category=18) and 4 forums for (former) CoCreate (http://ww3.cad.de/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro&showall=1&category=24). There have been a discussion during March 2008 (http://ww3.cad.de/foren/ubb/Forum29/HTML/002225.shtml) without any decision about moving the cad.de CoCreate forums or not.

[jeffz]

Hello - Jeff Zemsky here - PTC/USER Director for Internet Services. John Scheffel forwarded me this thread to add some comments.

Let me start by thanking you for taking the time to comment on this and I will probably forget to comment on everything above so I apologize ahead of time. If anyone has any specific comments or questions please feel free to forward them to me at:

jeffz@ptcuser.org

Let's start with the user account questions. The formality behind the user account has a few roots -

This account provides you with PTC/USER membership.
We use this information to vet the person signing up and confirm that they are not A) a competitor and B) not a spammer. We actually have domain based controls to sort this based upon email address. The following rules are in effect - domains that are competitors are rejected. Domains that are public generic (i.e. Hotmail, google, etc.) are sent to a queue to be verified (by me) that they are human generated and not a spammer or competitor.
PTC/USER actually uses this information during confernce planning and other activites as we look at the demographics of our users. Additionally this information is used by the Regional User Group chairs to find people in their area that might be interested in attending a RUG. This information is never shared or sold.
Email accounts - Up until last year we just used a Lyris listserv interface to communicate and everyone shared email address by default. With our move to Socious we moved to a forum interface that also supported listserv backend (This is optional - the Arbortext forum is setup as a pure forum for example). Even with the pure forum version we give users the option to subscribe via email to get notification and to respond via email if that is your tool of choice. For you web 2.0 people RSS is also available.
Accounts with no email address are assumed to be competitors or spammers and have their accounts deactivated.

Making information public or private - this will be improved over the summer with a project that will increase the granularity of what you can expose as public or private information. (Note this will include several other projects including Blogs
Making Forums public for read-only available without login -

No one has actually asked for this, but I like the idea. Certainly should work for the public forums.

No CoCreate Forum yet -

Yes - we have been working with members of the CoCreate user group (John Scheffel) to help guide the direction that we should go. We look for their guidance on making this effective. It could be as simple as one forum to as complete as migrating over all the existing data and forum topics. Our goal is to provide everyone a voice in the PTC/USER community

What else do we do on the Portal?

The portal contains more than just forums - here is some of the other areas we support

Technical Committees - These are groups that work with PTC product management to set the direction about product development. Discussions and topics range from simple interface issues to complex business process topics and cover all the product range. This gives you a huge insight as to what is coming. The other important aspect is great networking with other users to learn from. Some TCs have also started to put together FAQ, templates, training and other files for the overall community. They can be found on their TC Update pages.
Regional User Groups - Global interface to find and join local RUGs. RUGs have their own forums, file areas, calendars and events. Great place to meet and interact with other close by users.
Files - File sharing for the whole community. Files that are MS Office, PDF or text get indexed and are searchable.
Surveys / Polls - Support both simple surveys and polls for the community. Topics have ranged from "what physcial media do you prefer?" to "what impacts does DRM have your company"
Coming this year are more social networking features, BLOGS, Wiki, and articles
Just some stats - we are over 19,000 members strong

Thank you.

Regards,
Jeff Zemsky

[Peter Boks]

I have voted against migrating (forgot to log in though:o).
I am registered at 4 CoCreate forums (2x Dutch, 1x German and of course this forum) and have never found this to be a problem, although this forum is defenitely my favorate one.

I wonder why we should be affraid of loosing readers/members when PTC starts up their own forum. Why, if you consider the amount of data that is stored in this place.
Fear is a bad counsellor.
I have been a member of this forum, and the old ME10 forum, for more then 10 years now and through the years, this has allways been a fantastic place for asking questions.
I've allways had valuable help with my questions anyway.

And have you considered this:
I have entered this forum in the past with the impression that my personal data and e-mail address were safe and never to be sold or given to another party.
What happens with that if this forum moves to PTC.

Has CoCreate been taken over in the past before?
What happens if PTC decides to sell the CoCreate stuff in a couple of years? Do we loose everything?

In my opinion it is best to be independent.
Maybe a company like PTC can even benefit from an independent source.

[jeffz]

PTC/USER is not PTC, but a volunteer run user organization. Our mission is as follows:


To provide education and communication services for its members;
To act as a unified voice representing the membership to Parametric Technology Corporation.

We work closely with PTC, but are an independent group that is run and maintained for and by the users. For some more information click here:

http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/cm/ld/fid=12

z

[Wolfgang]

Making Forums public for read-only available without login -
No one has actually asked for this, but I like the idea. Certainly should work for the public forums.

I' fear you can't do it now/afterwards. Based on the history of the mail list server PTCUSER seemed to be used to reply with full quotes (regardless whether they are reply withing the web or by email) and also the standard company signature is attached many times. There are lots of threads where you can read (today as an registered user only) email addresses, phone numbers (also direct calls), postal addresses etc. Making the forums public you have to remove this information first or get the permission of all users. Looks like this is not feasible.

But I admit: I'm not sure what you mean exactly with 'public forums'. I assume you are talking about the 'Public Discussions' as they are titled at http://portal.ptcuser.org, don't you?

In vBulletin we have less information about the people but this makes "public life" easier.

BTW: because of the full quote method unfortunately used many threads are quite lengthy and hard to read IMHO. I'm more scrolling than reading. Don't like that.

[rbrennen]

The overall discussion is great. As things stand right now, though, I would prefer that the CoCreate User Forum stay separate. Perhaps after more discussion and some concrete proposals for a merge and/or changes to the PTC/USER forum, I will change my mind.

[mgb]

I also like the discussion. At the current time I would prefer not to merge the forums. I do like that Google reminds me I could have found what I was looking for in the forum.

[John Scheffel]

Making Forums public for read-only available without login -
No one has actually asked for this, but I like the idea. Certainly should work for the public forums.
Thanks very much Jeff for getting involved in the discussion. I'm glad to hear that you are open to making the forum viewable to people who are not registered. That was my main concern because we have a lot of guests who use this forum as a resource but don't want to register or post. I also think it is valuable to have the forum contents indexed by search engines so people who don't know about the forum can find answers.

BTW. I just broadcast an Email message to all registered members who have visited the forum in the last year, so we should see some more voting and posting.

[John Westerman]

And I would be one of those who just received the email from John Scheffel. :) As an infrequent user of this forum I'm inclined to go with the flow. Looks like some good discussion is happening already. I definitely resonate with the privacy issue, especially for email addresses. Seems like a number of times a year I see large, internal distribution lists compromised (with my address in the list), resulting in the requisite number of SPAM's. So, to make a short story long, I'll follow the lead of our seasoned members on pursuing the correct course of action. I do like the ability, however, to view the forum for info without logging in.

[rxcited]

I agree with all commentary posted so far. Presuming that PTC/User continues to enforce these basic incompatibilities (non-guest access and search-ability) on their forum, I don't see any advantages to merging until these issues are worked out.

I like that you can search the info on this forum without being logged in. Google is the first place I turn to when I need to find something out, CoCreate or otherwise. And I think the idea of excluding competitors is an unenforceable ridiculous holdover from earlier PTC paranoia. Moderators can choose to ban members who clearly demonstrate bad intentions or post misinformation. Spammers are another matter that I would prefer are never allowed to join. But of course any human spammer can claim to be a non-competitor non-spammer and get in anyway (until s/he is banned). Allowing guests to peruse the forums doesn't lead to spammer membership, but of course it would allow the "evil competitors" to snoop in on the discussions. To this, I say: So what?

[John Scheffel]

I wonder why we should be affraid of loosing readers/members when PTC starts up their own forum. Why, if you consider the amount of data that is stored in this place.
....
Has CoCreate been taken over in the past before?
What happens if PTC decides to sell the CoCreate stuff in a couple of years? Do we loose everything?
Thanks for posting your thoughts Peter, some perspectives I haven't heard yet. I'm not really afraid of losing members if PTC starts a separate CoCreate forum. I just think it is best for the user community to have "one stop shopping" so they don't have to follow or post questions in two different forums.

After CoCreate spun off from HP I think they were owned by two different private investment firms over the years, but they were never bought/sold by other companies. I think it unlikely that PTC would sell CoCreate to someone else, but it is something I hadn't considered. I don't think PTC has ever acquired a company then sold it, but in business anything is possible.

[John Scheffel]

BTW: because of the full quote method unfortunately used many threads are quite lengthy and hard to read IMHO. I'm more scrolling than reading. Don't like that.
I have to agree. The Socius package may be a good all-around choice for managing an organization the size of PTC/USER, but the forum part seems pretty weak compared to vBulletin, phpBB, and other popular options. Maybe PTC/USER should consider using a separate package for the forum portion of their site.

[MichaelA]

So I put in my vote as a Yes but I would put some qualifications on it. First we need to have a similar structure to the one in use already, need the various catagories otherwise information is too difficult to sort thru. that seems to be do able from the screen capture of the PTC site. As much as I like to keep "control" of our own stuff, having it supported and monitored by the folks at PTC should be a good thing for us. Just need to ensure we can still find it, easily share info and add topics/forums as necessary in the future.

My 2 US cents (definitely not worth 2 euro cents),

Michael

[jeffz]

But I admit: I'm not sure what you mean exactly with 'public forums'. I assume you are talking about the 'Public Discussions' as they are titled at http://portal.ptcuser.org, don't you?

BTW: because of the full quote method unfortunately used many threads are quite lengthy and hard to read IMHO. I'm more scrolling than reading. Don't like that.

We have both public and private access controlled forums. The access controlled groups cover areas like the PTC/USER leadership, Technical Committees (they discuss proprietary information), Regional User Group leadership and various administrative communities (i.e. World Event conference, etc.)

The quoting behavior is configurable per each forum. The Adepters list (Arbortext users) use the classical forum model so there is not the overhead of the hybrid forum/listserv. If it were my choice we would be straight forum all the way across - but we have some users with 15 years of experience with the listserv model.

[jeffz]

I have to agree. The Socius package may be a good all-around choice for managing an organization the size of PTC/USER, but the forum part seems pretty weak compared to vBulletin, phpBB, and other popular options. Maybe PTC/USER should consider using a separate package for the forum portion of their site.

We used to do this with our previous provider. Too much overhead with user account to forum maintenance, synchronization issues, etc. In terms of forum functionality I don't really see any gaps. From the list here the overall concern is being able to hit it from Google and threading (non-issue as this is per Forum configurable).

[Bobo82]

Hi all,
my opinion is that this forum is really useful and it's take me out of trouble a lot of time.
For me the best solution (if possible) is to insert a section about CoCreate in the PTC forums that redirect the user to this site. The problem of the required log-in, for me, is realy important. Probably the 95% of the register user, first visit the forum as guest to see if the forums really helps them and than, they become member (try and buy :-).

Thanks John, for ask our thoughts about this important decision.

[munich]

Hi,

also I don't use this forum much, I think it's better to remain independent till we really can expect that PTC will not sell CoCreate again.
Nevertheless, a link from PTC/User to this forum would be great.

[gmatelich]

For me the best solution (if possible) is to insert a section about CoCreate in the PTC forums that redirect the user to this site.

I was thinking along these same lines as well. This gives an official tie in with PTC/User, while retaining the look/feel/one stop shopping. I may change my mind if/when our company begins using other PTC products such as ArborText and/or MathCAD. Plus it fits with the strong independent streak many of us long time SolidDesigners seem to have (I know I know and ME10/ME30/Modeling. . . )

That may be more slashes per paragraph than I've ever used - maybe I'm already seeing things with a PTC point of view :-)

[gmatelich]

You're right, there is none. I got this confused with PTC's own user forums ( http://www.ptc.com/forums/ ).


What's the difference between the PTC forums and the PTC/User forums? Is that already a two-stop shopping scenario?

[Wolfgang]

We have both public and private access controlled forums.

The quoting behavior is configurable per each forum. The Adepters list (Arbortext users) use the classical forum model so there is not the overhead of the hybrid forum/listserv.

If I understand it right now non-public forums is something what a normal but registered user does not see at all.

You already mentioned in your 1st post that the "Adepters list" does not support the mailing list capability. Nevertheless some threads show a lot of (IMHO!) useless quoting. This might be 'old' user habits.

------------------------- off topic ----------------------
If it were my choice we would be straight forum all the way across - but we have some users with 15 years of experience with the listserv model.
well, we have some users with 11 years (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3157) of 'forum' experience, even when it have been another forum software that time AFAIR.

And I'm sometimes surprised myself that there are everytime some users reading,searching for information in these rather old archives forums (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=60) (nn viewing).

[dszostak]

I will abstain from voting on this forum topic since I'm a PTC Product Manager for CoCreate products...

But on another note, our vision for CoCreate users and PTC/USER (the independent organization) are selfishly directed towards future activity within the technical committees. CoCreate product management will need users to volunteer and play an active role inside PTC/USER for the success of CoCreate products in the future. Having good user participation in the technical committees will speak volumes to PTC, the product management team, and jump start the new process of determining future product enhancements!

How easily we come together, will be a win-win for all of us - PTC, PTC/USER, CoCreate users, and the CoCreate product management team. PTC/USER World Event 2008 (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6859) was the first step, the forum discussion is second, and the technical committes won't be far behind.

Thank you to everyone for participating in the discussion.

[Rick Snider]

Howdy all-

I wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts regarding the forums. I completely understand the concerns about not losing any existing functionality and maintaining privacy.

I am the Conference Director for PTC/USER, and I met several of you during the World Event in Long Beach. Prior to working for PTC/USER, I spent many years at Motorola as an administrator for our division's CAD/CAM/CAE tools including Applicon and later, Pro/ENGINEER. During my tenure, I was a vehement supporter of user groups and encouraged my staff to participate in the online forums (a big mailing list in those days) as well as going to user meetings. Not everything you need for success is provided by the software vendor and the user community is often times the means to get an accurate answer to a problem, quickly.

I wanted to provide some food for thought and emphasize an important point. In the software industry, many user groups are operated by the software vendor's marketing department. Still others have a board comprised of users, but the group is still financed and run by the software maker.

PTC/USER is different. PTC/USER was independently founded by end users, and is operated and financed purely by the user community. We are not PTC employees, and we do not receive funding from PTC. Why is this important?

1. Privacy. This has been a cornerstone of our beliefs for the past 19 years. We do not share member data entered on the portal with anyone outside of PTC/USER.

2. Credibility. PTC/USER is not beholden to any particular viewpoint, other than making sure there is a fair and free flow of ideas and information. We have no vested interest in selling anything. We don't particularly care if the discussions in our forums make PTC "look good" or not. We provide a venue where users can interact with each other, and with PTC, in an open and honest discussion.

3. Advocacy. We are the independent voice of PTC customers worldwide, and are recognized by PTC as such. PTC/USER ensures that your concerns and issues are heard, all the way up to senior management if necessary.

As an example, our Technical Committees have been quite successful in working with PTC Product Managers to implement user feedback in the software. I don't know the current numbers but historically, over 80% of submitted enhancement requests managed by the Technical Committees have appeared at some point in the software. In my opinion, few companies are able to boast such success in aligning their products with user needs.

For CoCreate users, I think joining PTC/USER presents a tremendous opportunity to influence PTC thinking in terms of product development and direction. The Technical Committees, Regional Groups and the member portal offer different resources to help you achieve your personal and company objectives. Working together with a united front, we all can achieve much.

Anyhow, I am always open to your suggestions and concerns. Please feel free to post them here or to send them to me directly at rick.snider@ptcuser.org.

Best Wishes,
Rick

[clausb]

What's the difference between the PTC forums and the PTC/User forums? Is that already a two-stop shopping scenario?

As far as I can tell, yes.

Claus

[pcushion]

I also voted no, but would consider if a link from the PTC-Users site to the CoCreate-Users site, and vice-versa.

Just my two cents ...

Happy 4th all ...

[tom kirkman]

I like the independence of this thread, where any questions that are "uncomfortable" for PTC would not be eliminated.

Merging would mean less shopping around for answers. However; with favorites set, it is easy to switch between forums.

So my vote is no.

[Greg Gonzales]

It looks like the poll has been closed, so I was unable to vote. However, my preference would be to initially create a prominent link from the PTC/User discussion forum to the current CoCreate User Forum, and in parallel encourage exisiting CoCreate Users to register in PTC/User and start to take advantages of some of the other features.

Then we can examine the merging of of the forums at a later date.