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Q:
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What is VersionOne Ideas?
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A:
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An online idea exchange that VersionOne customers of any size can add to their Enterprise implementation to facilitate collaboration with their customers, employees and partners. With Ideas, customers can submit and collaborate on product suggestions and help prioritize by voting for their top priorities, ensuring that you have direct visibility into customers’ needs.
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Q:
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How can Ideas benefit my company?
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Ideas can help an organization to help drive continuous improvements for an existing product, uncover new functionality to add to a service or identify completely new projects to consider for development. Ideas can help you meet these goals by centralizing and fostering the idea generation and collaboration processes across customer, employee, partner and prospect communities.
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Q:
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Why do I need an idea management tool? Couldn’t I just use email instead?
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A:
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While email is used daily by nearly everyone, it has some major drawbacks when compared to an idea management system including:
- Email is unstructured: Regardless of specific folders, subject lines, format or even email address, it’s nearly impossible to standardize incoming email from customers.
- Email is not collaborative: One of the biggest challenges of using an email system to gather product ideas is that it’s not open – only those people who receive the email can view and respond to the information. In addition, there’s no easy way to vote for ideas, or aggregate input in orderly or structured manner.
- Email lacks tracking and feedback: It’s extremely difficult to implement a tracking system in email that lets customers know the status of their idea at any point in time. With hundreds of ideas being submitted, it’s nearly impossible to organize them efficiently and thereby provide feedback to the submitters.
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Q:
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Who could use Ideas at our company and how?
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A:
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Although Ideas is intended to generate input for anyone who is responsible for product planning, Ideas can be used to collaborate with external customers and internal users in any number of ways:
- Product Strategists: Including Product Owners, Managers, & Marketers: Either externally through a product-focused public forum or internally through private forum, any product- related audience can contribute their thoughts and expertise to promote more innovative features, brand new products or to confirm existing product roadmaps.
- IT, Human Resources & Marketing for Internal Communications & Initiatives: A private forum can be set up in Ideas for Human Resources or other internal needs as a means of communicating about company vision or strategy, gathering employee feedback for process improvement or capturing cost-saving suggestions across different parts of the company.
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Q:
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Who are the end users of Ideas?
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A:
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Depending on the use of the various forums you set up, your community could be nearly limitless. You might invite external customers and prospects, internal users, partners, clients, project stakeholders, your team and anyone you serve or who is part of the product delivery process.
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Customization & Design
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Q:
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Can I customize the appearance of Ideas?
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A:
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Yes, the header and footer can be customized so you can add your logo, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, add your own site tracking and include links or a menu structure that is most relevant to your audience.
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Q:
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Can I change the “Welcome…” message?
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Yes. From within Enterprise, you can create a custom Welcome message for each forum to communicate specifically to its audience.
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Q:
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Can I customize or change the design of a forum?
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A:
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Not at this time but we invite you to add this idea to IdeaSpace, VersionOne’s implementation of Ideas, for consideration by all customers.
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Forums
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Q:
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What is a forum?
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A:
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A forum is a specific topic area that can be set up to gather ideas on products, projects or services. Depending on the structure of the project hierarchy in your Enterprise system, you may want to set up separate forums for each product or service you offer or for each client with whom you work.
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Q:
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What is a category?
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A:
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Categories provide some structure for the ideas within a forum, helping you to understand where the needs are and customers to understand the broad scope of the domain. You can set up categories in each forum for quicker sorting or filtering of the full idea list. For example, within a public product forum, you may have categories for UI, admin, reporting and support while a private employee forum may include categories for cost-savings.
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What do the number of ideas, comments, and votes in the upper-right hand corner mean?
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Those represent the total scope of what is contained in the forum. You will see the numbers change to reflect search query results when a search is performe.
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Q:
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Does Ideas include Private Forums?
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A:
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Yes, some things are best discussed privately. You can limit membership in private forums to:
- Individuals: Identify the specific email addresses of individuals who are allowed to access the system. Only those people will be granted access. Use this, for example, for a Customer Advisory Board forum.
- An Email Domain: Allow only those users that have signed up and confirmed emails on set of domains that you define. This gives you an easy way to create company-specific forums (ex. *@yourdomainaddress.com).
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Moderation
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Q:
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What moderation features do you offer?
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A:
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There are multiple tools available to moderate forums including:
- Official Comment: Ideas admins can post official comments that are distinguishable from user comments when viewed in Ideas to steer or close out discussions or to provide answers or ask questions of the original submitter and others who view the idea
- Review / Remove Content: The Ideas admin tab in Enterprise lets product owners review ideas or comments that users have flagged as inappropriate and easily remove any content deemed offensive
- Suspend Users: Ideas admins can easily remove users from participating in the community for any reason
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Q:
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How does Moderation work?
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A:
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Moderation occurs in both Ideas and Enterprise. In Ideas, users can flag both ideas and comments they deem as spam or inappropriate. From the Ideas tab in Enterprise, Moderators can quickly review all flagged content for verification, reversal or deletion, post an official response to an idea or comment, or block users from the community.
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Voting
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Q:
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How many votes does each user get?
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A:
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Each user has an unlimited number of votes and can cast, at most, a single vote for any one idea. Though voting is unlimited, users will find they can help their own cause by limiting their votes to only their top priority items so as not to dilute their preferences.
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Q:
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Can users remove votes from an item?
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A:
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Yes, clicking on the small red x will remove a user’s vote from that idea. Reclicking that area will once again add a vote to that idea.
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Q:
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Can users submit anonymous ideas, comments or votes?
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A:
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No, all users are required to sign up (and be logged in) prior to submitting an idea, posting or comment or voting.
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System Requirements
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Q:
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What are the system requirements for Ideas?
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Ideas requires that you are running the Spring ’09 release of Enterprise. Please visit our Community Site to download the most recent Enterprise releaseor contact your Account Executive to upgrade your Enterprise on-demand instance.
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Can we install Ideas on our servers?
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No. Ideas is only offered as Software as a Service (SaaS). We host and manage the service ourselves in our secure data center.
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What if I have an on-site (local) implementation of VersionOne’s Enterprise edition?
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You can still add Ideas to your Enterprise system. Contact your Account Executive to request Ideas.
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Subscription Plans
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Q:
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How is Ideas licensed?
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Ideas is licensed on an annual subscription basis by the total number of registered users in the system. Users only need to register once and they can participate in multiple forms.
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Q:
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How do you define a “registered user”?
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Any user that registers for the system, even if they do not post or vote, counts as a registered user. Visitors (non-registered users) to forums who can read ideas and comments are not counted.
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Q:
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What if I want to purchase Ideas?
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A:
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You can get started with V1: Agile Ideas for $200 per month for 500 registered users. Please contact your Account Executive or send an email to Sales@VersionOne.com to obtain a quote.
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Q:
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Do you offer a free trial?
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A:
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For a limited time, all VersionOne customers who upgrade to the Enterprise Spring ’09 release or later are eligible for a free trial instance of Ideas. The trial offer expires August 31, 2009. Get started with Ideas now.
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Other
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Q:
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Can I export to my Ideas data to Excel?
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A:
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Yes, just as you’ve always been able to easily export data from V1: Agile Enterprise, you can also export Ideas information out of Enterprise.
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Q:
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Can I "seed" a Forum with a bunch of ideas before launching?
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A:
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Yes, we recommend that you include some ideas to get the discussion started.
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