Now that 2009 is winding down, it’s a good time to review where we’ve been and look ahead to 2010. Specifically, I will review some of the goals I outlined in my 2009 New Year’s Resolutions post and share what we’ve been able to accomplish and what we have in store for 2010 in these areas…
My 2009 Resolution #1 was Get NI More Active in the LabVIEW Community. Over the years, we’ve had a policy of silence on the user discussion boards, and this year I was hoping to be more proactive when issues arise. It’s been a relatively quiet year in terms of major flame-ups on the forums – perhaps due to the terrible economic conditions we’ve all had to battle through. There was an interesting discussion about our annual release policy that came up in January on info-lv. I opened the floor to David Fuller, one of our LabVIEW R&D Directors to respond to the discussion as well. We also shared some of our cross-product integration testing processes in May after I had been involved in a few customer discussions about our testing matrix.
Secondly, we introduced a new feature on our Web site called Groups for organizing user discussions and feedback around specific interest areas. The top 3 most-popular groups are organized and run by product managers:
- #3 is for those of you interested in better user interface features and components in LabVIEW
- #2 is for users building large applications with teams of developers with LabVIEW
- And the top group focuses on LabVIEW APIs and scripting.
And finally, we’ve made a concerted effort to get some of our talented engineers to share their insights more with the user community through regular blog posts. We’ve had over 200 new blog entries from 10 different engineers this year – some of them established and others new in 2009. You can check them out at ni.com/blogs.
After reviewing our progress, we’ve actually done better than I expected. As always, we can do more, but 2009 marked a significant step up in our involvement with users through some of these new tools. Feel free to add any thoughts on where we can do more.
Inside LabVIEW 