Announcing the RemObjects Connect online support forum

Dear customers,

Earlier this year, we introduced you to a beta version of our new web based support community that we created to replace our newsgroups (and go beyond).

While here at RemObjects we’ve always been big fans of NNTP, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to ask new (and younger) developers to set up news readers (which many regard as legacy technology) to get support, and NNTP also makes it harder for “casual” visitors to our site (such as potential customers) to take a look into the support community before making a decision to go ahead and give our products a try.

We think a web based solution, if done right, will solve these problems, and give us a lot more that NNTP can’t do. There are other advantages, as well.

After reviewing many different options, and not really being happy with the majority of “phpbb” like forum solutions out there, we have finally got something that we are happy with. A web solution that lets you easily connect to the forums from multiple machines without losing track of what you have already read and what is new; it lets you subscribe to email notifications or subscribe to/favorite interesting threads.

We’ve been testing this solution for our private beta groups and with TeamRO for a while now, and in May we opened it up, in “BETA” mode, to all customers. Now the time has come to officially switch over to the new system.

Initially, “RemObjects Connect” will provide web-based forums in a “Stack-Overflow” style (which we think works better than traditional web forums, that are usually clumsy to navigate and hard to stay on top of). Over time, we plan to add more features, such as a marketplace for RO-related services (contractors, job-seekers, etc), “social” aspects and more.

To get started, go to connect.remobjects.com. For existing customers and people on our mailing list, if you click login, this will redirect you to our portal site, ask you to sign in with your usual RO website login, and then send you back.

For guests, i.e. those without logins, the public forums are available but in read-only mode, thus allowing prospective customers to review our support. Also, guests may sign up for an account, to gain read/write access to the public forums.

We plan to switch the “old” public newsgroups into read-only mode by the end of next week, and we encourage everyone wrap up their existing conversations. We will keep the newsgroups around “for reference” for a while longer, and are considering options for migrating their content into a searchable web database, for the long term.

Hope to see you on RemObjects Connect!

Mike