Grey Magauran's dashboard

Thanks for the reply, Thor. Private areas within public forums are great, but what many of us here are asking for is both public and private areas within private company forums. It sounds like your comment from a year ago is still true: "We aren't inclined to make whole companies "private." Just to be sure I understand, is this because GS is committed to remaining focused on B2C-consumer customer support interactions and isn't interested in or doesn't have the bandwidth to provide a private version of the same software for B2B-business customer product development interactions? Or are you saying that GS believes that B2B-business customer product development interactions should not need to be kept private between a company and their users/customers? Selfishly, I wish you offered a similar product focused on product development customer feedback mgmt because the additional touches in this post/reply/comment space really set GS apart. Throw in ranking/rating of posts, integrated survey functionality, and some custom configuration options for categories, post form fields, and status values, and GS would be the clear leader in this space. I guess I'll just have to hope that IdeaScale copies a page from your book with respect to your post/reply/comment UI and your change log and notifications. There's a lot to love about this interaction design. Well done! – Grey Magauran, on June 27, 2009 00:48

I am currently evaluating tools for collecting and managing customer and employee feedback for the B2B web application company I work for, and I would love to recommend we purchase GS, but cannot due to the lack of access control. We require a private forum for the following reasons:
- We are not willing to broadcast our community's ideas and our company's development plan to our competitors.
- We need one solution that will allow us to capture internal notes with community posts that are not visible to users who are not employees.
- We need to collect feedback from a small user group for beta features.

I understand GS's commitment to openness and transparency, but don't see how acknowledging that their are legitimate business needs for controlling access to conversations between a company and their customers would undermine this commitment. As people become more comfortable with having some of these conversations more publically, the need for access control will likely decrease, but it won't disappear altogether. And in the meantime, GS is losing customers that would love to start paying them. Since this thread is over a year old and nothing has been implemented to address this need, I have to assume that it is not a priority for GS and I will have to recommend a different solution. That's very disappointing.

I've been a fan of Adaptive Path and its alumni since I attended the launch party in SF shortly after working on a project with Indi Young, so was immediately interested in GS when I saw Lane was involved. I also very much enjoyed Thor's presentation at WebVisions a few weeks ago. I'm sure that GS is going to continue to improve, and I wish you luck with it. From my perspective, though, a little less ideology and a little more support for B2B business requirements would lead us all to a lot more happy customers (and business analysts/ux designers)!