In general, ASI is looking to do more public and by invitation betas and previews of upcoming products and features and even of proof-of-concept type software that may or may not make it into product.

See Don’s blog posting relating to this goal.

There are many benefits to inviting AiSPs, customers, and ASI employees to participate in this way, including:

• ASI gets feedback on the product’s usability while there is still time to improve it, resulting in a better product.
• ASI gets feedback on which features are important to clients and AiSPs, resulting in a product that better matches what is needed.
• AiSPs and consultants get a preview of what is coming, decreasing the time it takes to ramp up with each new release
• Customers get a feel for what to expect in the future, though not necessarily when. This should help in planning for new features and needed resources.
• All Q&A, feedback and debate is shared via forums and issue tracking making the development decisions and progress more transparent and open. Additionally, this creates a searchable archive of documentation to help out later in implementation and support.

For all of the above reasons, your participation and feedback are very important!

How to Participate

Forums

The project forums are the perfect place for questions and answers, feedback, and open debate. Anyone should feel free to create new topics or make comments on existing topics. If you have a question and don’t see an answer the chances are that someone else will be in the same position at some point. Getting the question, feedback, or debate documented in the forums will make life easier for everybody in the long run.

A few tips:

Each project has a special topic for announcements. The purpose of this topic is to allow the project’s "manager" to make important announcements about the project. Participants who subscribe to this topic will automatically be notified when new announcements are posted. For example, when new releases become available everyone who has subscribed will be notified immediately.

You are automatically subscribed to any topics you create. But you should also look thru and subscribe to other topics that interest you. This allows you to follow the debate or get the answer when posted.

Issues Tracking

If you find a bug or would like to request an enhancement to the project, the Issues tracking system is the place to go. If you are unsure if something is a bug or should be a feature, feel free to ask in the forums first. But once you are pretty sure, enter it in the issues tracking so it can be assigned, prioritized, and scheduled, if appropriate.

From the project’s home page, under Support, there are links to the support forums, to view pending bugs and feature requests, and to submit bugs and feature requests.

Demonstrations

If you don’t want to download, install, and use the application associated with the project (when applicable) there will often be a demonstration site setup. A more casual participant can often play around with the demonstration site and provide valuable feedback via the forums or issues tracking system.

Documentation

Documentation will also often be available for a project. And documentation is in beta too! Please feel free to make comments on the documentation just as you would the project itself. Some documentation will also have email links embedded within it where comments can be sent.