CF Brain Trust Results: A Summary

In the Brain Trust session at CF_Underground, the audience was split up into groups and each group was given a question of particular interest to the CF community. Here are the questions, and the answers each group came up with. While some of the answers have already been announced by Allaire (check out question 5 and you'll see that the community and Allaire have been thinking along the same lines), other ideas are new and may provide good feedback to Allaire.

1. Allaire consulting has recently expanded its services to include more customer support of ColdFusion installations--design, tuning, methodology, and testing scalability. What services to you think Allaire Consulting should offer to help you and your customers work together to ensure customer success?
• Tell us who the local Allaire support liaisons are (e.g. put a list of sales engineers, organized by location, on the Allaire website).
• Have a dedicated person per client for high dollar (gold?) support package. Allaire should make its support scalable. This is better for handling a high volume of calls.
• Make stuff work.
• Keep customers from shooting themselves in the foot.
• Align partners by specialty.
• Have Allaire concentrate on making products as good as possible.
2. Allaire Consultants and staff create and lot of technical information on using CF that is now well known. How can Allaire better share information in the larger CF community?
• Archive Allaire's internal consulting knowledge base for general consumption with summary logs. (They can make the customer's info anonymous.)
• Create an "Ask Jeeves" model for the Forums, and clean up extraneous threads once a definite answer has been approved by Allaire consulting or Team Allaire.
• Insert consultants, like Team Allaire, to produce/write this information or hire new people to do this.
• Align with CFUGs on content in both directions, so CFUGs both give out info from Allaire and funnel new info back into Allaire. More project life cycle articles as opposed to specialized issues of consultants. More technical case study presentations.
• Provide technical electronic copies, as opposed to Allaire's current marketing angle of monthly development news. Allow subscriptions to specialized fields, e.g. scaling. ?Would you like more articles on this subject: yes/no?"
• Expand beyond consultants to sales engineers and tech support. They have current insights that can be made public.
3. What would you change for the next release of CF?
• Making your own functions.
• Tag for debug on/off.
• Unchangeable formatted structure.
• Less buggy project management at Allaire.
• All variable scopes on debug info at bottom of page as part of standard CF.
• VB port for CFX headers.
• Debug on for IP ranges or C Class instead of simple IP address.
• Integrate Microsoft cluster server with CF server.
• True constants (Read only).
• Easier setup for debugging and browsing -- maybe a wizard?
• More efficient multi-developer source control.
• Design tab should not reformat code!
• Distribute VTOM scripts with CF standard.
• Integrate active directory support.
• Fix CFGRID.
4. There is a shortage of CF Programmers worldwide. How can we help with the shortage of CF Programmers? What are the best resources for learning CF?
• Allaire should give cash support to CFUGs to provide training. There might be political issues in doing this, so Allaire should give this support only if the CFUG participants also complete certification training at an Allaire facility with a waiver and/or an Allaire subsidy.
• Cooperative advertising for participants in this training.
• Companies in need of programmers should set up internships to train new ones.
• The CF-Talk mailing list should be summarized and presented for use in the Allaire training courses and to further educate the trainers.
• High school students?formal/informal program.
• CF_University: an online ColdFusion training center.
5. Where should CF and Java go? Given Java server pages' portability and increasing flexibility, what is going to be Allaire's focus in the coming years: JRun or ColdFusion?
• Java is "Poisoning the mind share of CF": People don't read what CF 5.0/Neo is, that Java is not a replacement for CF, it will be the compiled version of it. People are scared of Java as a new language and of their CF knowledge losing its value.
• Present Java as modules/custom tags, which means people don't have to learn it - they just call it!
• Write in CF, compile into Java bytecode.
• Allaire should adopt Red Hat's model of giving away the product.
• Allaire should not continue to extend Allaire Consulting because the other consulting shops cannot compete with the manufacturer.
• Allaire should create full integration with the CF_Beer tags.
• Programming background required for Java, not for CF. ColdFusion people will feel lost and confused.
• Don't change ColdFusion's syntax or Java's syntax. Keep them separate. Keep backwards compatibility.
• Have three types of script code:
  <cfscript type="JRUN">
  JRUN script
  <CFSCRIPT>
• <CFINCLUDE template="filename.jsp">
  <"filename.cfm">
6. What will the nature of web-related development look like in a few years and what should we be doing/learning now to be ready? Which technical skills are needed to leverage the next generation of Allaire products? Should we move "down" to J2EE or "up" to packaged systems like Spectra, or both?
• Learn about ASP (Application Service Provider)/Desktop model via the web apps.
• Learn good programming skills enhance/training so you can apply new technology.
• Be flexible. Use Java, ColdFusion, Spectra. Use appropriate language/technology.
7. Recently there has been a large of number of concerns expressed on various community listservs. How should Allaire address community concerns? How should Allaire interact with CF Community Leaders? How can Allaire improve the two-way communications with the CF community? For example by setting up a Community Relations Board, or supporting/getting on CF-talk and other lists.
• Allaire should have someone monitoring CF-Talk and other community lists. On the other hand, is that fair to Allaire? Should the community take some of the responsibility? Since CF-Talk is supposed to be a 'technical' list (with extremely high traffic), there's no need for Allaire staff to monitor that ? but the CF-Community list could be monitored.
• Question: Would people be more or less likely to post an honest opinion if they knew Allaire was listening? Maybe it would be better for key individuals in the community to summarize the posts and forward them to Allaire (with the names of the posters omitted).
• Maybe we should have some kind of governing body that represents all of the developers. Suggestion to follow same model that the Hewlett Packard (HP) community did: some kind of umbrella organization with dues, which would put out a newsletter, etc. Once a year, it presented its members' needs to Hewlett Packard. Because of the fact that it had thousands of developers behind it, and the monetary factor, it had clout.
• Is there a central person at Allaire who is responsible for addressing community issues? Who do we go to? That is unclear. At one point, it was Sam Coe, and then his responsibilities changed. From the discussion, it was clear that no one knew whom to contact when addressing these concerns. [Editor's Note: I am researching this now; as soon as I know, I will publish that information in Fusion Authority.]
• Even if we get some kind of Developer's Governing Body together, or some central person, how do we insure that that person has clout? How do we get Allaire to take him/her seriously? Conclusion: We need to have one central person at Allaire and one person in developer community, or one governing body. Point of contact for us, point of contact for Allaire.
• We need to somehow get a mass of developers behind this body, and it needs to be representative not just of specific people, but of the WHOLE community. We need to get the community more involved. There are 1800 people on the CF-Talk list, yet Allaire records 500,000 Allaire developers. Let's say 200,000 of those are CF developers: Look at the discrepancy. A lot of people are coding CF that aren't really active in community.
• A joint survey, created and disseminated by many mailing lists/publications with one central web location. Ability to then poll large quantities of people and accurately report back to Allaire with that "mass" of developers behind us. Then Allaire would have to take us seriously.
8. The 3.0, 4.0 and 4.5 release of CF were buggy and the 3.01, 4.01 and 4.5.1 release were better. Should Allaire release bug free products or are other goals more important? If so, how can Allaire release bug free products? How can Allaire improve their beta program to produce less buggy code?
• There is no such thing as bug-free code.
• Delivering quality products is a priority.
• What "carrots" can Allaire offer to elicit customer beta testing? 1) Software gratis for testing 2) Discounts on conferences 3) Free training on beta version. Live support reps available -- People should not be put on hold for support on beta!
• Potential beta testers are often busy working and cannot spare time to test; offering a big carrot such as a CF cluster license may elicit more responses.
• Qualify beta testers: environment, experience level, some established criteria.
• Involve the user groups.
• Link to bugtraq website.
• When a bug appears, give the option to auto email a report back to Allaire.
9. How should Allaire change the way it relates to Allaire Partners and CFUGs? Would clear public mission statements toward partners and CFUGs help? If so, what should such a statement say?
• Help CFUGs with getting speakers.
• Help organize partners to speak at CFUGs, and offer partners time to talk about their products/services.
• Offer TechNet style database (aka Microsoft) for partners. Include things such as the Allaire consulting white papers.
• Send an Allaire paid-for speaker once a year for every CFUG.
• Offer a library of presentations made by other CFUGs.
• Give partners discounts on training and conferences.[Note: This year Allaire did give a discount on its conference to partners.]
• Have a central location on Allaire.com for CFUG leaders and members to find presentations and post presentations for other CFUGs to use.
• If giving partner consulting leads is not possible, remove it from the partner information.
• Offer streaming video of presentations for CFUGs.
10. Allaire's stock tanked recently. What should Allaire do, if anything, differently, in products, marketing and internally?
• Focus programming and marketing on CF -- stop buying new products.
• Improve company culture within Allaire.
• Clearer mission statements and goals.
• Listen to the community more.
• Have departments within Allaire work together and not against each other.
• Only hire people who fit the Allaire culture. Encourage misfits to leave.
• Be more careful releasing bad news.

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