Monday, August 4, 2008  

On Friday the Questions and Suggestions pages at the Customer Support Wiki were replaced with Forums. These pages prompted discussion among wiki users and relied upon EditMe's comment mechanism for a rolling dialog. While this worked, it forced every message into a single thread. The Forums now allow each topic to have a list of replies. In addition, each topic becomes a new page on the wiki that is included in the site search.

I'm excited about this for two reasons. First, this will continue the move we've been making from closed-door private support using our web-based ticket system to the more open wiki environment. The benefit of this has already been clear - the creation of a searchable knowledge base at the wiki site has dramatically reduced support questions that are answered there. As responsive as our support is, it's always faster to get an answer right away with a quick search of the wiki site.

Second, these forums are the foundation of a module that will be made available to all customers later this year for integration into your sites. Many customers are using Comments in a forum-like way and will benefit from this added flexibility. Instead of adding a whole new layer to EditMe pages, forums are tightly integrated into EditMe's existing structure. Each topic becomes its own intelligent wiki page that has the forum features built into it (reply, subscribe, etc.). This means forum topics are automatically included in your site search, page index, recent changes and RSS feeds.

A third forum accepts private messages directly to EditMe staff. Messages you post to this forum can only be seen by EditMe staff and you, providing a space for customer support issues that aren't appropriate for a public forum. This forum will eventually replace our separate web-based ticket system and accept input from the support@ email address.

So next time you have a question, give the forums a try and let us know what you think.