I can see there are four people online right now. Real-time contact would be great feature.
This has been brought up before but means knowledge/chat would reduce on the forums and the chat room data would not be easily searched/viewed.
Thanks,
Will.
Thanks will, i see.
Real time chat can be a great help though, and with enough numbers can be a much stronger resource for up to date help.
But i see the concerns.
Thanks
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve begun migrating to Suite…
A lot of the old “knowledge” for SugarCRM CE is quietly disappearing. You can tell that Sugar is trying to wash their hands of Open Source.
It’s quite common for me to find a Google result that looks like it addresses my needs, only to be redirected here: https://community.sugarcrm.com/sugarcrm
I’ve tried searching that community site for the same info Google brings up. It’s generally not there.
The same goes for SugarForge. A lot of those projects are just gone. The only way I knew about some of them was I investigated Sugar back when Suite was first being born… I’m just now making the switch.
I’ve spent quite a bit lf time reading between the lines and playing “Guess and Check”. I’m slowly getting to where I need to be, but the path has been anything but straightforward.
Open source projects as a whole tend to suffer from questionable documentation. I think that creating documentation for Suite is a contribution opportunity for some of us in the community.
To that end I understand why these forums are so important. The posts are an incredibly valuable resource.
I agree that forum posts are a valuable resource.
However, as you say they can easily disappear. They can also cloud the issue and slow progress; because they inherently become ‘old’ posts or knowledge that has less relevance in a world where applications are updated and change rapidly.
My guess is that the lack of good documentation in open source software is down to a lack of time and return on investment, because to document something takes time away from developing. I’m taking the view of a small business owner by the way - i assume big companies take a different view?
For me, real time help and collaboration is way more valuable than what i consider to be the ‘static’ resource of ‘historic’ forum posts. Don’t get me wrong though - i have learnt so so much from forums generally. In fact, for example, every single day i can google to find out how to fit a plinth to my kitchen cupboard from a woodworking forum that i will never go back to.
But isn’t software different? The move from sugar to suite is exciting, liberating, inspiring and rewarding - but for me the biggest stumbling block has been in momentum.
Right now there are 207 guests and only 6 members online. Surely having a chat room - perhaps searchable?- would be as equally valuable as searching forums, but have the benefit of real time collaboration ?
So start an IRC channel. The bulletin boards and forums are used for just that… To archive the data and make it available for later reference. Is there a #SuiteCRM?