opendms
in it together
community is the key
opendms is all about community and there is not better place for support to start
methods in the madness
all the latest tools for support and training will be applied to the opendms project
working together is the charm
opendms is all about community. In fact, it can’t exist and grow without the help and support of all community members and the dealer members taking up the products and services and helping to cover the true cost of running the enterprise. For this reason, opendms is able to provide the portal to community members to work with other members to share their opendms experiences and, most importantly, to build the “body of knowledge”, and the experience this knowledge brings, into a powerful support tool.
opendms is not a software company building a single product and then supporting it’s users directly. Admittedly a large part of the support assets of the portal will be generated by the opendms team, we expect, in much the same way many other successful open source communities have, to have our members “fill in the gaps” and become a fully embedded support asset in its own right.
Whilst a software product can be wrapped in technical support documentation, and the opendms products and services are no exception, it is amazing how important the experiences of other users can be in providing the community with valuable reference material and road maps to getting the most out of the open source experience.
The opendms team see their responsibility to be providing the very best tools and services to;
- provide technical support for their core products and services;
- offer third party developers (dealer supported and commercial) to be able to include their products and services into this support matrix; and,
- facilitate the community support environments to allow the meeting together of community members and their sharing of ideas and experiences.
We live in a time of rapid continuous communication and many tools are available to help provide content rich output with little or no cost. It is the opendms team’s core tenet to provide all community members with the ability to tap into these products and services and to manage all source so that a single cohesive support environment is created and maintained.
getting the message out there
As the opendms project matures, the opendms team will be leveraging the various “powerful” social media tools (Facebook, Instragram, Youtube etc. Et. al) to provide the technical information required by community users to access and use the core offerings of the opendms products and services. As mentioned elsewhere we consider the community to be making use of;
- core offering – applications built by the opendms team;
- community offering – applications built by third-parties (perhaps by a dealer or dealers’ IT support or independent IT companies) that are designed to be included in the opendms ecosystem; and,
- external offering – “global” applications build by non-associated companies and providing software development kits (SDK) to provide external interfacing (e.g. Xero, Zoho CRM etc.).
This “breakdown” is very high level but the spirit of the product groups is well articulated and it is our firm belief that the products from these groups and the support to community members for these various products should be seen to be as homogeneous as the product delivery will try to be.
The opendms team will be moderating all community support streams and making sure that all content is valid and kept up to date. Tools such as this web site, Facebook, Youtube and Instragram etc. will be used to let community member know of changes and product events and provide training material of a singularly high quality.
The opendms team will be able to help third-party developers bring their community offerings to production and offer seamless integration of these products into the technical product and services stack of the opendms project as well as offering access to the various support stacks supporting the community.
Further to this, the opendms team will be creating a number of community support systems to allow group support through on-line moderated forums, web-casting sessions for product presentation and more localized member to member direct chat services.
We imagine that some community members may even be able to offer their support as a “consultancy” with other members as a commercial offering; this is completely acceptable under the opendms ethos.
As we said above, this is all about community; opendms thrives or dies on it.
