How We Handle Bug Reports and Product Feedback

We are committed to enhancing Projector on a continual basis and, as such, welcome feedback from our users about what works, what doesn't work, and what we can be doing better in the product. We thought that it would be useful to explain how we incorporate that feedback into our product planning and also discuss some escalation options that you can turn to if needed.

Bug Reports

The best way to let us know about situations where Projector just isn't working how you'd expect it to work is through our support team. The more detailed information that you can provide, including details like the specific user or specific project that's experiencing the issue, a screenshot showing the behavior and any settings that may have led to that condition, exact error codes or error messages that were displayed, or exact timestamps when errors occurred, the more likely the support team will be able to assess the situation and troubleshoot it quickly.

The support team will also work with you to understand the error enough to try to reproduce it, assess the impact that it's having on your organization, and identify any possible workarounds to get you by until we can resolve the issue. They have a variety of tools available to them, including the ability to access a snapshot of your data taken at the end of each week as well as the capability to log into your live installation if necessary. In addition, they can arrange to set up a screen-sharing session with you at a mutually agreeable time so that they can see the error first-hand and to try to troubleshoot the issue real-time.

Once the team has a sufficiently detailed understanding of the nature of the bug, we take it through a triage and prioritization process. Bugs that cause significant loss of functionality, that could cause loss or corruption of data, that don't have a reasonable workaround, and/or that are reasonably likely to occur are generally fixed and patched as soon as practical. Less severe bugs are fixed and included in scheduled releases as dictated by the priority and severity of the issue. In either case, the support team makes every effort to notify the original person who reported the bug that a fix has been released, and significant bug fixes that may affect a larger percentage of users are listed in release notes for major releases.

Product Feedback

Like bug reports, oftentimes the best venue to provide feedback about the product is via the support team. It is often useful to provide the team with detailed information (much like with bug reports above), examples, or even mockups. The most important information to provide the support team, however, is the business need behind the request, as they may be able to suggest a slightly different way of looking at the problem and provide an approach that is supported by the current product.

In cases where the business need does require a change to the product, the support team reviews the feedback with the product management team, and we take it through a very similar prioritization/triage process as described above for bug reports. We also take into account additional considerations of whether responding to the feedback by enhancing Projector is consistent with the future direction of the product, whether we can come up with an enhancement that is generally useful for our client base as a whole, how the enhancement fits in with other changes planned for the product, and how often we have heard similar feedback. Based on these factors, the enhancement request may be targeted to a specific upcoming release, or kept in a general enhancement queue to be considered as we redesign different portions of the application.

A week or two before major releases, we generally describe what enhancements are included in the new version in a set of release notes. This document is e-mailed out to Projector users who have requested that we e-mail them when new versions of Projector are released (Administration > Users > User Role Overrides > Notifications), and also often include an invitation to attend one of several webinars that we host to introduce users to the new features. Our implementation consulting team can also work with your organization to help you configure, conduct training, and roll out new features if you need additional targeted support.

Development Cost Sharing and Customization

There may be cases in which you have identified an enhancement that you'd like to see in the product, but which isn't slated for implementation in the short team because of competing priorities or the non-generalizable nature of the enhancement. If the enhancement is critical to your business, there are some other approaches that we can take, and you should speak with your main Projector contact to talk through these options. That contact may be your sales representative, your implementation consultant, the product management team, or whomever you have the closest relationship with here at Projector. If all else fails, let the support team know that you'd like to speak with someone directly about the enhancement, and they can put you in touch with the appropriate people.

Once we have a better understanding of your needs, we can help you understand some of the options available to you. If the enhancement is something that is consistent with the direction of the product and generally useful to other users of Projector, but which hasn't bubbled to the top of the priority list, we may arrange to implement the enhancement more quickly under a development cost sharing arrangement. In this model, we will generally split the cost of the development with you. The enhancement will become part of the core product itself and will be made available to other Projector users, just like enhancements implemented in the past are available to you today.

Enhancements that are very specific to your business or for which we can't figure out a generalizable solution may be implemented through a product customization. This may be implemented entirely outside of Projector in a separate program or integrated into the product in a way that can be turned on as needed. Customizations are generally more expensive than cost-sharing enhancements, and depending on the nature and complexity of the functionality, may also incur an ongoing maintenance and support fee.

Integration

Finally, enhancements that are significant enough that it would be prohibitively difficult for us to build a solution to support may be better served by a separate application, either commercial or custom-built, that can be integrated with Projector via our web services API. If you have in-house resources to build the custom solution or integrate the system with Projector, we'll be happy to share with you the web services API documentation. If you need more significant support, our engineering team can provide assistance on a time and materials basis ranging from helping your technical resources when they have questions to taking ownership over implementing the full integration with the other system. Again, speak with your Projector contact or the support team if you'd like to talk through different integration approaches.

Conclusion

In general, our goal is to help you get the most value out of Projector as quickly and as cost effectively as possible, and we welcome your feedback in how we can best accomplish that. Our preference is to show you how to use the current product to best advantage to address your needs, which means you can do so immediately at little or no incremental cost.

When we do suggest an approach that involves some form of billable development investment, we don't do that as a means of making a lot of money (that's not our business model), but rather to help offset the costs of additional hiring, resources, and attention that would normally be directed elsewhere. And, even if you do have that brilliant idea that you don't think we'd implement right away and you couldn't justify paying for, let us know anyway. We do take all this product feedback seriously and do consider all of it as we continually work on making Projector ever better.

Thanks,
The Projector Team