Sonny, I agree with you, the CS design is very good and keeping it in line with incubating site - would be even better.
Thanks for the awesome work, can't wait to see it. Ilya -----Original Message----- From: Sonny Chhen [mailto:sonny.ch...@citrix.com] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 7:14 PM To: cloudstack-users@incubator.apache.org; cloudstack-...@incubator.apache.org Subject: RE: ACS - Better Marketing - YOUR HELP IS NEEDED Hey Ilya, I'm playing around with redesigning the current incubation site for people who are onboarding or want to learn about CloudStack for the first time. I'll send out a design proposal and plan on discussing this with Joe, Mark, David as to how we can get this off the ground. CloudStack has a pretty good ui design and we might as well try to extend this sense of design to all other aspects of CloudStack(from marketing, social, documentation, etc...) Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Sonny H. Chhen Manager of User Interface & User Experience | Citrix Systems - CloudPlatform 4988 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA -----Original Message----- From: Musayev, Ilya [mailto:imusa...@webmd.net] Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 2:47 PM To: cloudstack-...@incubator.apache.org; cloudstack-users@incubator.apache.org Subject: ACS - Better Marketing - YOUR HELP IS NEEDED To be completely honest, CloudStack is an awesome product, with one major flow - it's a "best kept secret" not too many know about. The last thing we want to see is for CS to become like BSD (awesome and stable) but barely used. I'm not Citrix employee, I will speak freely - so pardon my honesty. We lose the market to a peer pressure phenomenon known as OpenStack, I'm not saying OS is bad by any means, but realistically, many companies go for OS - because thats what everyone talks about, they don't use the approach of what is right for my environment, instead they go for the buzzword. Not many can actually get OS to work - in true open source way - and end up paying for various companies to make it work for them and maintain as well. We need to get the word out there for CS - we can do better. For the most part, (my strong opinion based on where I worked in past) I can say that in most use cases for small, mid and large size companies, CS is a better fit. Bad marketing, works against everyone's interest. Anything from future job opportunity - to actually working with a product that is simply great, stable and feature rich. Here is how I propose we fix this: For each of the bullet points below - we assign leads that work with contributors. 1) Create an ACS social media marketing team - We NEED social media attention a. Gather list of ideas b. Meet regularly on IRC to follow up on progress and discuss what can be done better c. Pick the best voted ideas d. Assign the duties and roles e. Conquer - one at a time f. Create Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube Channels or use existing means and other social media g. Blog with SEO in mind 2) Show the world how you can get ACS to work in your environment on youtube and other video sites a. Create a set of step by step tutorial (video preferred) i. Basic ACS POC setup ii. Setting up ACS in corporate environment with strict compliance iii. Hosting environment iv. Development Environment - educate new developers on how to troubleshoot issues and how to address them - actual basic examples would be really good on how bug X was fixed b. Take it a step further and show how you can bolt on CS with other offerings - again video preferred but text will do i. Show how to bolt on OpenSwift for block storage, OpenShift (linux PaaS) and IronFoundry (windows PaaS), Chef and SpaceWalk and others 3) Create support groups based on area of expertise, for example I can help with VmWare and CS setups, but I'm not good with XEN or KVM at the moment a. We need support groups for different hypervisors, storage and networks that can help newcomers b. Each issue resolved must be documented preferable on wiki - any documentation (including copy and paste from mailing list) is better than none 4) Host local user group meetups a. Show CS and help others 5) Reach out to other open source (and not) players and work with them to have easy integration and cross functionality a. RedHat with OpenShift PaaS b. IronFondry c. Cisco, Microsoft, VMWare, etc... d. Become part of major distributions e. Others will join as soon as they see the momentum * Next Steps to make this happen: o Gather list of people willing to contribute their time with skills and desired areas of involvement, even if you are a new comer or don't have enough experience with CS, we can use your help! o Set the time for regular IRC meeting o Help lead this effort as well as participate Together we can make ACS better for everyone and we can beat the buzzword players - because we are truly better. Your input is welcome, if you want to reach out to me off the list, please feel free, I'm on irc.freenode.net nick "serverchief", or email me directly. Thanks ilya
