So here I sit Friday afternoon, in lovely Phoenix, at an Airport Mexican restaurant, thinking back with fondness on my experiences at Axway’s 2008 Connections Conference. The food was great, the drinks were better, and the company topped the list as the bext thing about the conference. As an Axway customer who has been desperately trying to build an online community and develop a sense of comradeship (Yes, thats the word spellcheck put in when I tried to put Comradory), the conference was a pleasant experience on multiple fronts.

One of the things users almost overwhelmingly seem to agree on is the idea that Axway doesn’t want to listen to their ideas. Since I’ve had so many ideas on a web presence for the Axway user community, I can tell you that Axway is listening. As I mentioned previously, I attended Customer Advisory Board meetings on both the Technical side, and the Industry side (Financial services for the company I’m consulting at now), and it was clear that they are willing to listen. What doesn’t seem so clear is the mechanism of action by which they will respond.

While it may seem like an overly cumbersome endeavor on my part, I’m launching yet another Axway site. This one is called http://www.dearaxway.com. I’m going to use every business card I got at the conference, every mailing list that I know of for Axway users, Facebook, Twitter, and any other method that I think will work to get the word out to Axway that the users are talking. The idea is that like with a “Dear Abby” letter, we can get Axway to respond to us on the website. The Axway employees I met at the conference all seemed like they would be willing to take a minute out to answer people’s questions. So if we start asking, they’ll probably start answering. The site is something a little different than I’ve done, so it’s undoubtedly going to be a bit of work, but I think it’s going to be worth it.

I dont want people just to write negative letters, or just positive letters, I want people to simply address Axway with their thoughts with the hopes that they’ll listen, and answer us. One of the things that appeared to be most important to a large number of users is the notion of using some sort of list or poll to work to prioritize what Axway’s working on for the products we’re using in at least the Financial Services vertical - though this could obviously be, and should obviously be extended to other verticals as well. Dear Axway will be a great place to do that, because there will be a (hopefully) large section called Dear User where Axway can address the users en masse to ask us questions, and we can answer them.

As with this site, I’m hoping that the www.dearaxway.com site can be integrated into the overall concept of the www.axwayuser.com site with the knowledgebase and QA and forum and whatnot, but it may be one that could stand on it’s own easily. I’m going to attempt to launch the site by the end of the weekend, but believe it or not I’ve got a bit of a life outside consulting, Axway, and other web work - She’s 23, about 5′5, brown hair, beautiful blue eyes….he’s something like 6 months old, yellowish/orange, very loving..likes to bite…of the tabby variety.

I’ll still hopefully some up some more of the conference tonight and share some of my notes, but if not I’ll count this as today’s post and write about that tomorrow.

Until Then,

Au Revoir