Opening up the Ideas section to non-maintenance Mathcadders?

[StuartBruff]

Whilst I understand the rationale behind limiting some features to only people who have a Mathcad maintenance contract, I believe that restricting the Ideas section to just this group is counterproductive - there is still a large Mathcad user base who are not on maintenance but nevertheless have ideas that could benefit Mathcad. Furthermore, the inability to contribute may lead to a lack of engagement with PTC's developments and a drifting away from Mathcad to other products that are more inclusive in their support.

Consequently, I suggest that it would be beneficial to users and to PTC to open up the Ideas section to all (community-registered) Mathcad users. It should be easy to split out 'maintenance' votes from overall votes if PTC wish to take more note of their paying (but not 'paid') customers.

Stuart

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

Hear! Hear!

[mzeftel]

Stuart and Fred,

This is a company-wide decision for all products. If you purchase or upgrade to current versions of Mathcad 15 and/or Mathcad Prime 2.0, a free year of maintenance is included in the purchase price, as well as a copy of both versions of Mathcad.

People and companies, who continue with maintenance, are users who have committed to supporting new features.

Alpha testers don't always have maintenance, but have ample opportunity to contribute their suggestions.

And anyone can contribute to the discussions on the Mathcad Community. If an idea is that popular, any maintenance user can post it to the Ideas section for voting.

And we do read what you post here.

Best regards,

Mona

[StuartBruff]

OK.

The downside of committing to support new ideas is that those ideas aren't guaranteed to be ones a user would want (eg, multi-dimensional arrays) or support (eg, no 'right hand page' printing).

Does buying maintenance get a committment from PTC to respond to Ideas, giving a rationale for accepting or rejecting the idea and a ball-park estimate of when it could be expected to form part of a release? (Historically, user-ideas submitted in response to a request seem to have entered a void with no feedback, eg http://communities.ptc.com/message/159782#159782).

Stuart

[mzeftel]

Hi Stuart,

I'm not sure what you mean by the downside of committing to support new ideas? If users vote on the ideas, then we'll get some feedback on what the most popular suggestions are. That won't be our only way to select features for upcoming releases. Not all users come to the Mathcad Community pages.

We also gather feedback from product management, sales, support, and technical engineers who meet and talk with customers. We run usability tests, surveys, and alpha tests, and gather feedback from users who participate.

And we also strategize about where we want Mathcad to go. All of these issues go into the mix, from which we prioritize features for each release.

We have pledged to respond to the feedback posted in the Ideas section, with status and comments. Thes stages are:

• Current functionality
• For future consideration
• Implementation in progress
• No plans to implement
• Open for voting
• Under consideration

Mona