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Vectorworks Development - Open and then Closed Again


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A couple of years ago there was this amazing thread coupled with an early Vectorworks Design Summit that opened up what was happening in the VW development process.

 

 

It gave many of us hope that there would be more openness in the future about where VW was going. Unfortunately, last year things reverted back to the closed-ness of the past and the old teaser approach.

 

I'm wondering what happened to the openness of 2016...

 

Kevin

 

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I know!

I was invited to be a Beta Tester - right before they said they were going to do a public beta - which I do not think ever happened...unless you count 1.0 as the beta release - which unfortunately most firms I work with do - opting not to upgrade until SP1 or SP2.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

You know what? We can talk about that! I'd been meaning to spread some more info and now is as good of a time as any. Everything here is taken from my own point of view and subject to change, I am simply discussing (and open to QnA related to it in this thread) how things have changed and where I see them going.

First: It is actually happening! Just a bit slower than I had anticipated. Understandably, there is still a good deal of concern about discussing features early on, mainly because of how close competition can be with products like ours. Less so Vectorworks VS AutoDesk, but the other players closer to our size.

Regarding Open Beta: The only real reasons remaining that we don't have a much more open beta test right now are technical. There are still systems to flesh out related to getting serial numbers to users, tracking feedback properly, implementing ways to ensure the beta program isn't taken advantage of, etc. All the thousand little things that come up when you take a very close look at going from a completely secretive system to an open one. I have to confess, I didn't even think of half of them until they were all laid out in front of me by some of the engineers over lunch one day. Management is completely open to changing the beta process, they fully agree with the issues brought both here by you all, by noisy employees like myself, and from within the existing beta program in previous years.

 

Some backend changes: Likely many of our more avid forum-goers have noticed @BetaBot chugging along, getting secret likes and racking up post counts even though when checking it's profile and activity, it doesn't appear it's actually done anything. This is because it operates entirely in the members-only Beta section of the forums. A lot of work I've been doing since the 2016 release has been planning, implementing and tweaking various technologies that came as part of the forum in order to replace some older communications systems we used to use internally and to connect employees with beta testers. Sadly, a lot of this I can't detail (yet) but it did eat a good chunk of my forum time, which very likely makes it feel like we were clamming back up. I apologize for that.

@BetaBot at the moment, has only two functions. First: It automatically creates a post whenever a Beta member creates a Bug or VE ("Vectorworks Enhancement" AKA Wish) in our internal tracking software, JIRA. This was the first step in bridging the forum with our internal tracking in a way other than myself or another employee manually transferring things from one to the other. It's accomplished via some clever scripting one of our engineers was kind enough to cook up for us and it has the potential to eventually allow for the automatic filing of bugs and wishes triggered by a forum post. There are a bunch of other technical and procedural hurdles between now and then, but it looks doable.


Second: Beta testers are encouraged to follow BetaBot, as then they will automatically get a notification when any new beta bugs, wishlist items, or Task Videos (more on those in a second) are published. This solves the problem of users missing information that can happen if you don't have your notifications on the forum turned up to 11 as I do. This may eventually lead to other bots in the future making tracking things you're interested in easier.

We can also directly control BetaBot, so members of QA, managers or myself can log in as it, then make posts knowing that all users will be notified about it. We do this for the releases of the various Betas, which aren't only for full release versions of Vectorworks, but SPs as well. A sampling of items discussed prior to the release of 2018:


Screen Shot 2018-05-15 at 1.42.15 PM.png

(Note the slightly different theme, which assists in making sure users don't accidentally post NDA material where it shouldn't be seen)

The 2018 development cycle was the very first that relied entirely on the forum and not the older systems (mainly email distribution lists) that we had used in prior years, so, wisely in my opinion, management decided that the ONLY thing we should do to shake up last years beta, was to change the platform we used to distribute and discuss it. Now that a full cycle has nearly completed and the new system has been given a good shake, they're open to doing more with it and going further.

On the sharing of development early on: This is still planned but again understandably, the powers that be want to do it in a much more controlled manner, me simply taking it upon myself to do writeups or share some random screenshots that weren't vetted by anyone before the public got to see them. They want to establish a standard for how this is done and give these items the attention they deserve.

That's... well thats not even a fifth of it, but thats all I can likely share for the time being. I do want everyone to rest assured that I am still a huge fan of beanspilling and that I still poke and prod those in power here to leak what they can whenever possible, which should be in the upcoming months!

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14 minutes ago, JimW said:

There are still systems to flesh out related to getting serial numbers to users, tracking feedback properly, implementing ways to ensure the beta program isn't taken advantage of, etc.

 

Normally I see :

- no Serials at all, just a time lock like a Trial Version and the promise of a coming next Beta Version before the first ends

- no serial but online activation and checking

- Next Releases Beta runs with the Serial/License of the previous Version

 

Like you need a valid Modo 12.0 License to run Betas of 12.1, 12.2 and maybe 13.0

I think the Beta Forums are open for all valid licensed users. Can't imagine they will lock

users out again, after their licensed version gets to old if they don't upgrade (?)

(They hope the Beta will convince users to upgrade)

 

 

Tracking and making use of feedback may be the hardest issue.

But it is not the majority of all users that is interested in a Beta program at all.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
1 minute ago, zoomer said:

- no Serials at all, just a time lock like a Trial Version and the promise of a coming next Beta Version before the first ends

- no serial but online activation and checking

 

1 minute ago, zoomer said:

Like you need a valid Modo 12.0 License to run Betas of 12.1, 12.2 and maybe 13.0


This is the kind of thing we'd like to see, but have to build the backend guts of it, as well as alter the application to accept things other than regular SNs and trial keys. OR just tweak the trial key system so that it can pop out differently-timed keys, longer than 30 days but shorter than a year. This is possible at the moment but only manually, and its very time consuming to do for even the smaller beta test groups of the past much less the larger ones we plan to have going forward.

OH! Forgot to mention, we have also decided to dramatically increase our beta testing user pool.

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37 minutes ago, JimW said:

That's... well thats not even a fifth of it, but thats all I can likely share for the time being. I do want everyone to rest assured that I am still a huge fan of beanspilling and that I still poke and prod those in power here to leak what they can whenever possible, which should be in the upcoming months!

 

Thanks for the updates Jim. I knew some stuff was happening behind the scenes but I was a little spooked by one particular part of VW2018......

 

Kevin

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