Do we need an update to our on-topic policy?

Question

The product suite we have traditionally known as Tridion is always subject to changes of marketing emphasis. The parent company, SDL are actively working to produce a more coherent offering, based on input from the various companies that they have bought over the last few years. We can observe that various products are increasingly seen as part of a larger offering, and perhaps also there is an expectation that they will be implemented by the same teams, or teams with overlapping skill-sets.

This raises the question (again) of what is on-topic on tridion.stackexchange.com. Should we, for example, accept a FredHopper question or one on Media Manager?

Some time ago, we discussed this, and the answer (at least for me) was a clear No.

Has the ground shifted since then, and if so, how much and in what direction? Ought we to accept a broader topic area, or should we stick to our purely Tridion focus?

Answer 1

For every product from a different "lineage" than Tridion, you have:

• Documentation
• User interface
• User community (with possible overlap of customers)
• Implementation community, if different than above
• Integration between systems
• Installation and setup

You pointed out the integrating connections are on-topic, which make sense.

We might also include topics to the extent that these overlap.

Before Fredhopper promotions, managed in the Business Manager had its own documentation, UI, and users. It was a separate install. With the latest SmartTarget, some of the Business Manager functionality is now within Tridion's UI. These also impact the documentation, users, and install.

So maybe Fredhopper elements in Tridion's interface should also be Tridion questions?

I think we'll have a major change if/when something comes in the box that is explained in the same documentation, show in the CMS UI for CMS users, might be set up by the same teams.

Answer 2

Quite soon after the start of this site I found the choice we made to name it Tridion might have actualy been rather limiting. If we were to do it all over again, I would suggest to name it SDL and allow for questions on the entire product range. Which maybe is a bit broad, but that would at least give us room to grow.

The way I see it is that we have a community and they have questions which they need answered, and the knowledge for that is available in this excact community. If we limit this site to only Tridion questions, isn't that the exact same reason why we started this site in the first place? I mean, we could already ask programming questions on StackOverflow and Sys Admin stuff on Server Fault, but there was no good place for us to ask the functional questions and keep everything together.

If we are as strict to keep this only Tridion, we can only force the people with Smart Target and Fredhopper questions, to create their own site. And with an even smaller amount of people and questions, that site will certainly never make it passed its beta state (even we might never get there the way it currently goes).

So the way I see it is, we have the knowledge, those questions are not in any way threatning the usefulness of our site, so why should we block them? It is an opportunity for us to grow...

What I do think, is that we should come to a mutual agreement. If we all want to welcome more than just Tridion, we should check with Stack Exchange if we can make that more clear in our FAQ pages. It still makes sense to state what is and what isn't allowed on this site, I don't think we should ever allow questions like "How many sheet of paper does a toilet roll have?", but since our community knows Tridion and everything around that, I think it makes sense to allow questions on those topics too.

Answer 3

I'll chime in on this to say that I think the answer should still be no.

StackExchange sites work best when they are narrowly-focused. The intention is to draw experts on a particular topic to produce a useful Q&A resource about that particular topic.

The range of topics specifically about Tridion is broad as it stands, covering a great deal of ground and encompasses many - often disparate - disciplines. Expanding the focus to encompass all SDL products risks diluting the site and diminishing its usefulness (not least because it makes it less likely that experts will spot questions they can answer).

Stipulating that "SDL products" are on-topic also seems like a fairly arbitrary boundary (given that a Tridion Q&A was the original intention); if any SDL product is fair game, then why not any other technology that is commonly used alongside Tridion - C#.NET, Java, Solr, IIS...

I think the key here is that other technologies are on-topic insofar as they are being discussed in the context of Tridion.

Maybe there is call for a level of discretion; if Tridion is not the central focus of the question but the problem is likely to be of particular relevance to Tridion developers (beyond tenuously-linked questions that are, e.g., about another technology that is often used alongside Tridion or that Tridion developers are simply "likely to be able to answer"), you're probably okay.

To an extent, I think this question is moot in that if another technology becomes so closely associated with Tridion that it is appropriate to ask about it here, then it is likely already to be on-topic under the current rules.

Answer 4

To basically echo Bart, I will say that allowing those questions seems to be the right way to go.

Forcing them into even smaller communities will not do anyone any favours at this point.

Most of the questions are about integrations with Tridion as far as I can see.

The decision to name it Tridion was ultimately a little shortsighted but the proposer at the time couldn't have known the direction SDL would take.

We could see what the options are for renaming or start a separate proposal for SDL perhaps?