Last month we enjoyed the hospitality of the Ascential management team at the Ascential World 2004 in Las Vegas. It was a gala event with good food, informative presentations from dynamic speakers and the opportunity to network with a worldwide assembly of Ascential product users. Twice as many people attended this year’s event, so the collective community seems to grow and grow. We were one of the show sponsors, and our “pod” was very accessible to the attendees. We talked to many current and prospective users, which gave us lots of very interesting feedback about our DSXchange user forum.

The informal polling we did gave us some perspectives that we had not otherwise considered. From the new TX users, to the experienced Server folks, and all those in between, the most interesting comments came from our interviews with financial analysts that watch Ascential for their shareholders. The most frequent question was, how much did we charge for all the solid content we provided to the community? More surprising was their response when we said that, so far, we just don’t charge anything.

We also talked to folks who said they didn’t use the forum because it didn’t provide answers to their specific searches. When I asked “Did you post a question based on your request”? They answered “No”. We informed them that if they had posted, the odds were good that an answer would have been posted within hours. It seems they weren’t used to a forum that is as active as ours!

Another large company decided to use our site instead of their own internal forums to provide a location for all their developers to centralize and leverage the vast amount of knowledge that’s available daily.

The most significant conversation was with Ascential employees that are looking for ways to more closely integrate the DSX and ADN. Although those ideas are very early and fluid, it does raise the question to all of us, what direction should we take our group. As we approach 6000 worldwide members, it really isn’t too hard to understand how our costs of managing this have increased, and how the concept of “special services” or “premium content” does beg to be evaluated.

I guess the bottom line is we at the DSXchange and the DataStageXchange do plan to “shake the tree” a bit and see what fruit bears out. Over the next month, we plan to reorganize and upgrade the value proposition to all the Ascential community. I encourage each of you to respond here and tell me what you think. I will post some ideas on the forum in the “editor’s corner”. Please feel free to “weigh in” on how it might work for you. Stay tuned.