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Please help an Oracle Product Manager to scale !
By frank.nimphius | July 3, 2007
I recognize with great pleasure that my blog entries are read by so many Oracle JDeveloper users and that they seem to help solving their issues. It makes me happy to see the Oracle JDeveloper community growing, which I can tell from increased traffic on the OTN forum and the number of Oracle technology related blogs showing on the Internet. This in combination helps us to build a better Oracle Jdeveloper product with each release and also make sure we have enough googleable content out there so nobody need to feel alone.
Most of my blogging ideas are derived from questions I answer on the Oracle JDeveloper forum on OTN, where I usually spend 2 – 3 hours a day to answer questions and to develop testcases. The testcases I develop end up becoming bug entries, enhancement requests or just food for my blog.
Recently I decided to also turn some of the information I gather into how-to documents than into blogs, which increases the time to market, but gives me the opportunity to write something more complete (for example: I am currently writing a how-to that explains the use of Web Services with complex return types in Oracle ADF). Beside of this – and as you would assume I have other responsibilities within the Oracle JDeveloper PM team – product related, customer focussed and organizational – which makes the rest of my 10 – 12 hours average work day (my wife calls me workaholic and I think she’s right – but I can’t help myself to get out of this fun game).
But there is a flip side of being exposed on OTN and the blog community, which is that I receive mails from readers and JDeveloper users asking to assist them with one of their coding challenges they face. I love helping because for me solving a technical issue is more fun than puzzling on a sudoku grid – which I am not good at anyway. However, individual support doesn’t scale if results are not shareable with others so they can be found in Google.
This means that everything you want me to look at needs to be on the OTN forum first to give other community experts and team mates of mine – like Ric Smith, Shay Shmeltzer, Steve Muench, Lynn Munsinger and Grant Ronald (sure I forgot some) – who also monitor the forum, the chance to provide an answer, reducing the response time big time (especially if the area of the question is one that I have to ping them for – which I often do). Exception to this rule – of course – are Oracle employees which have internal projects that don’t belong to a public forum or that work with not yet released software.
No doubt, I will continue answering mails that are sent directly to my inbox. However, the response time is depending on the time I have to spend on the subject and my other workload defined by my manager, which means that asking the question on OTN could be faster. Sometimes it hurts me seeing the backlog of mails I maintain that I haven’t had time to reply to – so I am seeking for a way to shorten the list.
You can expect me monitoring OTN frequently, but please don’t send reminder mails if you haven’t heard from me within 24 hours (I am not as good as Jack Bauer in my timings). Chances are that I did see your posting but did not have an immediate response to this and wait for someone else to give it a go. Steve Muench wrote us an application that I use 2 times a week to follow up on forum threads that I joined in.
Now how can you help me scaling? Its easy – post questions on the OTN forum, follow Shay’s 10 commandments and become an active part of the community in that you answer questions and contribute your experience in blogs and articles. Most important, be patient with me and forgive my long response times to mails sent directly to me.
Frank
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