Hi everyone, I’m Pete, I recently joined Phocas as the Global Education Program Manager, and one of the things I’m most excited about is this community.
Over the coming months, you’ll start to see some changes to the PUG Forum and the wider community experience. I’ll be reaching out to some of you directly, but if you’d like to share your thoughts, please feel free to come to me too (you can hover over my profile and message me directly if you’d like). What would help you? What would you like to see? Your input will shape what this becomes.
Sounds interesting, the PUG Forum here have been active as customer/users/phocas-peeps interact here, but as a whole the community site haven’t developed much in recent 10 years I think - so new focus I think is mostly welcome!
Hi Hakio, thanks for the welcome! Absolutely - we definitely don’t want to lose the amazing connections that already exist on the PUG Forum - just expand and grow them and the wider community and (hopefully) make it easier for people to connect.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been speaking with some of you directly to get feedback about the forum. I wanted to take a moment to give a quick update and share what was heard and what we’re planning to do about it.
What you told us
A few clear themes came through loud and clear:
The forum can feel like a black hole for feature requests - things get submitted and then can go quiet.
Roadmap visibility matters. You want to plan, and the more visibility we can give to the roadmap, the better that planning will be.
People enjoy the community-to-community connections, hearing other people’s solutions to similar data challenges can be really valuable.
Some categories need a tidy-up - and some posts might need to shift to different categories to make it a bit clearer.
Long-tenured users want more advanced content and peer connections.
Contributors want to feel recognised for the value they add.
For anyone that has given feedback so far - thank you. For anyone that has further feedback to give, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly and I’d love to connect.
What we’re working on now
Roadmap transparency - We recently launched What’s New in Phocas here Product updates | Phocas software | Phocas - and we’re working on a way to share more visibility into what’s coming. Watch this space.
Feature request clean-up - We’re going through open requests to acknowledge, categorise, and close out anything that’s already been delivered. If you submitted something and never heard back, you might see some movement in this space over the coming weeks as we try to close of what has launched, what is in the pipe and what is still being considered. Throughout May we will try to get this to a cleaner place to make it easier to interact with moving forward.
Forum structure and look - We’re reviewing categories and will be doing some tidying to make it easier to find (and post to) the right place. We are aiming for a revamp later in May or early June, to hopefully make it feel a bit more fresh and easier to interact with.
On the roadmap (coming soon)
Regular Phocas-led posts - tips, previews, and release highlights.
Contributor recognition - we love the idea of surfacing who the power users and community champions are. We’re exploring how to do this well.
More advanced content - dedicated space for deeper technical discussions for experienced users.
Better integration between the forum, the product itself and our wider training and enablement.
More opportunities to connect and learn together. We are exploring learning circles where we come together and solve problems together as a community.
More updates coming soon. Please reply below or reach out directly if you have any questions.
Hi everyone, just updating on some changes coming soon to the community forum.
You might have noticed we have condensed the category options into four categories to try to simplify the discovery process. We now have Ask the Community, Share What’s Working, Announcements and Product Ideas. If you have a question and want the support of other Phocas users and the Phocas team, use Ask the Community. If you have a really useful process that you think is worth sharing with others, please use Share What’s Working. We will use Announcements for some updates from the Phocas team (including this one) and then Product Ideas is where you can share and vote on ideas that would make your Phocas experience better.
Over the years we have not always done the best job closing out Product Suggestions, even if they were adopted and are now in the product. We have started to clean some of these up, and moving forward can commit to tying out on each thread so please post ideas as they come.
There will also be a slight change to the theme coming up soon, so stay tuned for that.
As always, please reach out if you have ideas or suggestions for the forum or the wider community.
Hi Pete - welcome I guess.
Absolutely - we definitely don’t want to lose the amazing connections that already exist on the PUG Forum - just expand and grow them and the wider community and (hopefully) make it easier for people to connect.
Roadmap transparency - We recently launched What’s New in Phocas here 
Feature request clean-up - We’re going through open requests to acknowledge, categorise, and close out anything that’s already been delivered. If you submitted something and never heard back, you might see some movement in this space over the coming weeks as we try to close of what has launched, what is in the pipe and what is still being considered. Throughout May we will try to get this to a cleaner place to make it easier to interact with moving forward.
Forum structure and look - We’re reviewing categories and will be doing some tidying to make it easier to find (and post to) the right place. We are aiming for a revamp later in May or early June, to hopefully make it feel a bit more fresh and easier to interact with.