I’ve gotta admit, I’m a little bit frustrated with Axway lately. As always, there’s lots going on in the world of Axway. I’m in the process of certifying FTP, SFTP, and FTPS for automated pulls using Synchrony Gateway 6.11, have one last trading partner to convert to complete my PCI Compliance Conversion project, and get to enjoy the company of Axway support on site Monday and Tuesday for some “Advanced Training” when it comes to troubleshooting support cases. It’s not all fun and games though.

Since this past summer, I’ve been working on figuring out how to organize an online community of Axway users. This was solidified by my attendance of the Axway Connections conference, where I attended multiple Customer Advisory Board Meetings and heard customer after customer echo the same sentiments I have regarding the need for customers to be able to interact with each other, and most importantly - with Axway. The coolest thing about the conference was that I met with some people from Axway who were very interested in collaborating on this community thing. I had conference calls with people from support, marketing, the CTO office, and others. I explained all of my plans and ideas, and postulated with them on the importance of this being a user based community, not one hosted by Axway. I offered the opportunity for Axway to help support it to ensure longevity and accuracy of content. I got nothing.

Instead of the collaboration and help, I’ve gotten nothing. I have made a few attempts to contact my various “points of contact”….the last response was that we’ll talk Monday, and that he got another call from marketing that I said “Axway Sucks” on the website again. Obviously if you’ve been here (or just scroll down), you’ll see that even created a whole Axway Sucks category. Why was that? To gripe about my troubles with Axway software? NO. To tarnish Axway’s good name to make the competition look better? Yeah…that would make my expensive software certifications and countless hours of effort way more valuable. I’ll save you the scrolling down and give you the gist of it; I get multiple hits each day on this website from people searching the term Axway Sucks. I created a post and category where comments are open to anybody so that people could fill us in on why they were searching the term. I asked what they hoped to get out of it.

Do me a favor. Go to google, and search for “walmart sucks”, and see what comes up. First though, I want you to guess what the first rew results will be. Do you think you’ll find a site regularly monitored by Wal-Mart employees who could use the feedback received to improve products or services? Or do you think you’ll find sites, where complaints fall on deaf ears and urge people not to shop at wal-mart? Well I did the legwork for you, and they’re all the latter.

So here’s what I’m curious about (keep in mind that this is a blog, so I’m allowed the occasional rant). Why is Axway so opposed to users communicating outside of their confines? First it was the Yahoo groups that were kept private so that search engines couldn’t pick them up, and now it’s the forums.axway.com site. It’s perfectly understandable that a company wants to keep an eye on what’s happening when it comes to discussions about their product, but to host them? There were multiple responses in the yahoo groups asking “Shouldn’t users be doing this?”. Well here I am! As of November 24th, the full-blown Axway community site will launch. I’m sure it didn’t occur to Axway when I explained all of my plans to them that them launching a site promising to be the Axway community might hurt membership on my site (note, they dont have a font called “facetious”). So who is going to join that site? Axway told me they’d help with a press release or something, but now that they’ve launched their forums do you think it’ll still happen?

Comments are open, and there will be more to come!

Tony