Coming Soon! A New AppSheet Community Site

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your feedback in the October community experience survey.

We’d like to share the highlights with you and also let you know that these insights are helping shape the future community site as well as additional community programs coming in 2022! My colleague @Peter is leading this effort along with others on the team.

The most valuable community features you highlighted were:

  1. Q&A forums- you like getting quick responses to solve questions. You like having direct engagement with the Appsheet team. You think we can do a better job at helping new community members understand how to leverage existing answers and ask great questions. You’d like to be able to mark a comment as a solution.
  2. Feature Ideas: These are important and we can be more effective at communicating the review and status of submitted ideas.
  3. Articles & tutorials: there is so much great content, but it can be improved to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Some additional insights:

  • Bring back the office hours!
  • You’d like to see more members sharing the apps they’ve created.

With this feedback we’ve been hard at work creating a new home for your community conversations. On January 25, 2022, the AppSheet community site that you engage with today (where we are right now) will be part of the broader Google Cloud Community.

We’ll be posting more details and sneak peeks in the coming weeks, covering some of the functionality of the new site, so please make sure to check back for more announcements.

Thanks to all of those who have contributed feedback. If you missed the survey, you can still fill it out and share your thoughts, or include @Peter in relevant conversations on this topic.

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29 REPLIES 29

AndrewB
Community Manager
Community Manager

AppSheet community,

I’m Andrew from the Google Cloud Community team. I’m excited that our community team including @Lauren_van_der_Vaart @wturney will be supporting the AppSheet community beginning in January.

The community team is responsible for the community platform infrastructure, member engagement, virtual events and meetups, and recognition of the top contributors. Ultimately, we’re here to partner with the product team to help our customers achieve their goals with AppSheet.

As an observer of the AppSheet community for the last year, I’m impressed by the level of engagement and enthusiasm, which we aim to support and maintain during the transition of platforms.

Based on the community feedback we’ve received, we’re focused on introducing some key community features:

  • Easier ways to stay notified of platform updates
  • Bringing back Office Hours starting in February
  • New content series highlighting the top customer apps
  • Monthly meetups showcasing app creators and their apps

We’ll continue to share more information in the coming weeks, including detailed FAQs, so make sure to check back for more announcements!

Hi @praveen @Andrew_Biernat

Thank you for pointing us in the direction of a new community.

I remember being impressed by the enthusiasm of this community, as I had never experienced a community where I could interact with Creators and platform developers from all over the world like AppSheet.
I am very happy and looking forward to seeing it strengthened this time.

Also, as I mentioned in the survey, I am hoping that all feature requests will be carried over.
As your know, feature requests are an important asset that the AppCreator and AppSheet teams have been accumulating based on customer feedback.

I hope that this will be managed properly by the new community.
It would also be great if we can see the status of the AppSheet team work (not yet started, under consideration, to be implemented, already implemented, not adopted) like other PaaS and SaaS.
Currently, I can only see the status of Vote by Creator and it is unclear what the status is.
In addition, there is a problem that the more experienced Creators are not able to express their opinions due to the limited number of voting tickets.

I also think that the decision not to adopt feature requests is a big step forward for AppSheet.
One of the values of the community is that creators can know that AppSheet will not adopt their work if they make the right decision.

I hope to experience the expansion of the AppSheet ecosystem through the community in the future, and I look forward to the development of new communities!

Thanks,

I would like to see a sneak peak at the new platform.
What I mean by that is that a lot of us haven’t used Google Cloud Community and we are a little bit confused about it.
Does this means that Discourse will be left and replaced by GCC?
What about the way we will interact with each other on a different platform? Can we see that before it’s all carried to the new site?
In general, I have so many questions and I just hope that all of this will be on the creators’s best interest

Hi @Takuya_Miyai thanks for your feedback! Yes, feature ideas will be carried over to the new platform and ideas will have a status ie. New, In Consideration, Planned, Not Planned, Delivered.

Thanks @Andrew_Biernat

I am very happy to hear that.
It will make it easier for us to show our customers what AppSheet is all about.

For me (with almost 4 years with AppSheet), the old style of AppSheet way of doing things seems to be changed.
The feature request we posted here in the community was monitored and respected pretty much. But we are on the feel our voice is not reaching out to the team these days.

New features are added, which is welcome but not really based on our community voice based. The example is Automation.

We simply hope we will be back to good time that our tiny voice for betterment and new features are reaches out to the team, even a bit.

@Steve
@Takuya_Miyai

Note that I’m not involved in the new platform. I’m not part of that team.

@tsuji_koichi I know the way the team has been able to interact with and quickly react to community feature request/ideas has changed as the team has tried to align with new processes - it’s disappointing that the effect is voices not being heard, I’m definitely sorry that’s been the experience.

I’m real excited about this new environment because there’s a revived strategy and prioritized area for curating ideas from users, and keeping everyone updated on how they’re being considered in the roadmap by product/eng teams. This area will align with how other Workspace and GCP communities interact with feature ideas, and will be closely related to a full, new calendar of AppSheet events/webinars for discussion/feedback. Hoping this will help us take a few big steps back in the right direction on this front, and definitely curious for more of your feedback on it as we’re able to share more preview.

Hi @Peter
Good to see you here. Thank you for taking our words. We are looking foward to peeking into the new platform soon, probably early next year? I personnelly hope more of “your” engagement in new platform to make AppSheet overall platform far more better.
Office hours (hopefully with my time zone) is one of missing pieces. Great to know it will be back on the track!

Nostalgic “Tony’s corner” , “Peters session” , “Santiago session” … Hopefully they will be back!

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Austin
Participant V

The complete googlefication is upon us. Don’t really feel like there have been any benefits as a creator to it but I digress. There will definitely be a plethora of loss in this move.

Loss of Steve alone is a blow that can’t be recovered.

To clarify, I’ll be on the new platform! I’m just not part of the transition team. I have no idea whether I’ll be a part of whatever formal team supports the community after the transition. But I’ll be there, even if informally.

All of us know, this wonderful community is not runnable without you, Steve. I m sure you will be sitting on the driving seat for us on the new platform for sure.

estamos com você Steve

I feel the same about all of this.

I would like to see more transparency.
Instead of “Hey, we are doing this because you needed it, it’s better” something like “Since Google has to integrate on all corners, this is another step we have to make”.
I’m not sure if there is going to be a clear benefit to the users/customers/creators from the migration to GCC.
From my POV, there are none. Even I feel like this is a bad move from an Open Source service/platform to the data-hungry Google stuff.
I think that more engagement from the team is better no matter the platform.

In other words, I’m not happy with this change, as I’m not with any Google related thing to be fair.
But this change specifically feels unnecesary and more of an obligation rather than an upgrade.

  1. Q&A is something that could be done if the AppSheet team is more engage
  2. Feature requests could be managed by the same thing.
  3. You can make articles and tutorials easier to find if you implement a Community Wiki. Honeycode is managing all of it’s documentation through Discourse (although I don’t use it myself and can’t talk about any other thing related to HC, I just found usefull the way they implemented it)
  • Office hours have nothing to do with the platform
  • More members sharing apps. The same

Please don’t get me wrong, I really want to like this change since I’ve been enjoying the platform and (even more) the community. I’ve been helping others myself since I love to share whatever I can and you can see that on the Leaderboard (another awesome part of Discourse that I found recently btw).

I just feel so bad that we have no choice nor voice sometimes about this kind of changes.

I don’t think Appsheet was ever Open Source? Just independent.

There’s a leaderboard?

It’s not, Discourse is.

https://community.appsheet.com/u?order=likes_received&period=monthly

Austin
Participant V

Tied for 6th on all time topics created wooh.

Hi @Andrew_Biernat

Looking back at the feature requests, I remembered that I would like to have the fix requests for small issues categorized and managed as knows issues.

When I come across such a fix request, I am sometimes confused about how to tell the AppSheet Team.

  • Support form?
  • Create in Question topic?
  • Comment on the announce topic?
  • Or create a topic with a feature request?

For example, the following.

I hope that the new community will make these kinds of knows issues clearer.

Great feedback, thanks @Takuya_Miyai

@praveen , @Peter , @Andrew_Biernat

I’m looking forward to the improvements in the community but I’d like to double check about whether or not information will be lost. For me and many long timers here, this will be the third major iteration of the forum. When we moved from the first forum (at least the first one I was involved in – not sure if there was something before that) we lost access to old posts. I think it might have been possible to transfer more of the old posts from the previous forum to this one but, as I recall, you decided that many of the older posts would not be relevant. Since the platform has evolved a great deal in the past years, there’s a part of me that is sympathetic to that decision but, at the time at least, I really felt the loss of the archive.

Can I think of the new system as only additive or will there be features and/or data that will be lost? If older posts will be lost, I’ll want to archive some of my own posts on my own so I’d like to know in advance. Thanks!

P.S. The leaderboard has been mentioned in this thread. That’s one example. Will the leaderboard just disappear or will that information be migrated in some way?

Hi Kirk - we will definitely be migrating all of the content to the new site so all of your posts will be retained.

Regarding the leaderboard, while the leaderboard might not exactly calculate in the same way in the new site, all of your previous contributions: posts, answers accepted, likes given, likes received will contribute to your rank in the new community. Hope that helps.

Yes. I can sleep easily now. Thanks!

Ratatosk
Participant V

Interested to see what changes to come. Not really sure how the forums can be any better than it is right now. I frequent a lot of community forums online, and this is by far the best and most extensive one, regardless of software.

One thing I’d pop in here, presume this is most relevant location…

When I’m trying to looking for questions to repsond to, simply havinvg the number of responses is not enough. It would be helpful to see on the main list of questions which have already been answered successfully. So I’m not going in, reading everything, then finding out it was already answered.

Also it might be worth having a view of questions older than a few days which have not been answered.

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I was about to say that.
Another good Discourse feature btw
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Just kidding, I don’t want to keep looking like the negative one about the change

Hi @Andrew_Biernat

It reminded me of another case that bothers me in the current community.

As AppSheet becomes more and more known, there are news and other things that I want to share with the community.
In this case, I am not sure which category to choose.

  • Resource?
  • Question?
  • Announcements are obviously not available to users, but the nuances are similar.

For example, the following is a case in point.

This is just a small quibble, so it’s not important, but I hope you find it helpful.

Thanks😃

Hi! It occurred to me today that one problem with the current community is that video cannot be uploaded to it directly. As a result, videos are few and far between. I wonder if that issue will be resolved with the move to the new community site.

Hi @Kirk_Masden as of right now the new site also does not have direct video upload but I will have the team look into this.