Ideas...

I understand your frustration, and we've heard similar comments from our users in various meetings, events, and so on.

There are several things to keep in mind with how Ideas work:

- Every idea that gets submitted is reviewed in a timely fashion by OpenEdge Product Management. All appropriate ideas, and this is essentially all of them, make their way into our product backlog for consideration in a future OpenEdge release.

- The release cadence for OpenEdge is typically 1 or 2 feature releases each year, with perhaps 40-60 new features in a release. For example, we are currently (August 2015) beginning the planning for the release after OpenEdge 11.6. Let's say that a great idea is submitted today, it gets a lot of support (votes) from the community, and it gets scheduled for the release after OpenEdge 11.6. By definition the earliest that the feature would be supported in the product is approximately 12 months from when it was entered. More typically the fastest time from Idea submission to product feature delivery is 18-24 months, and on average an Idea could be on the list for a number of years before it is implemented.

- The OpenEdge product backlog is many hundreds of items long, and we do our best to prioritize in order to deliver the most valuable features that the community is looking for. Given unlimited resources we would deliver on all new features

in a single release. Reality is that while we have a significant number of resources working on enhancements, we have enough in the backlog today to keep everyone busy for years to come. The result is that your favority Idea may not get addressed in what you feel is a timely manner, but it also does not mean that it is not a candidate for a future release.

- We are constrained by the Community system capability to marking an Idea as "Under Review" (the default status when an Idea is entered), "Coming Soon" (the status we set when we are committed to delivering a feature to satisfy an Idea), "Completed", and "Not Planned". You may have noticed that a number of Ideas are currently "Coming Soon", as we anticipate completing them as part of the OpenEdge 11.6 release. Once delivered we will set their status as Completed.

- The only other communication vehicle we have is the OpenEdge Roadmap, which for legal reason is not something we publish but rather we deliver at various events/meetings as appropriate. This is where we lay out our direction (new features that we are focusing on) for the upcoming 2 years.

We have had ongoing discussions internally at Progress and with our user community on how we can improve our feedback to you on your Ideas. Suggestions are welcomed, and please be assured that your ideas are valuable to Progress.

What should motivate people to leave the ideas on product enhancements forum when there are no discussions or even any brief feedbacks from development or product management? I tried to believe that someone in deep space does read our messages but it did not work.

Probably we have the different experience. For example, I have TS case opened in 2014 and I did not yet get an official response. The case is still opened. And, btw, during last weekend we were affected by the same issue. Do we have an enhancement request or a problem that our customers can't solve?

@Rob If every idea is read it would be nice if there was some feedback that it was.

• Some indication in where in the roadmap it would/might fit.

• I think it would also help if the idea's in this form could be listed in order of the roadmap, maybe use tags indicating a preliminary milestone if that's the only thing available on the forum.

I know this won't be a commitment but it would give some idea on which importance/priority was given to the idea.

[mention:32a62ba0f37747fdb44c2796fce8670e:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] It is a pity that the status limits you, but if you put it in your backlog, you will most likely have a reference for it. Just putting the reference number in a comment would at least show to us that it was actually considered a worth while idea. We all have backlogs and we all know some issues will stay there for ever if the correct market conditions does not occur to bump them to the top of the list.

In fact, if the dev team simply comment on an idea at all, it would already be an improvement, as it would at least show us that we do not waste our time when we write, read and comment on the list.

Second the idea of PSC commenting on the threads. At the very least an acknowledgement that it was read would be nice.

Some back and forth discussion about the merits of the feature would be nice.

Or at least the comments for the ideas that got enough votes. And it'd be a reason to vote for the enhancemnts.

Adding some reaction from management or development to the posted ideas would be great indeed, even if it's only to say that something is good/bad idea or taken in consideration (although more elaborate responses would be even better). This should be feasible I think...