An ESRI blog post that was posted this afternoon gives us a little bit of insight into some improvements that are coming down the line from ESRI's support staff. This list of improvements includes tools to help ESRI's support staff more efficiently troubleshoot issues and ESRI's new "Bugs Online" service, which was introduced in the plenary session at the User Conference this year. All in all, some very welcome changes.

If you haven't used the online support center lately, you may not have noticed that major improvements have recently been pushed out, including the addition of RSS syndication and more comprehensive search capabilities. Overall these are very welcome changes. One of ESRI's weaknesses continues to be its lack of documentation and transparency, but they seem to be moving in the right direction. Hopefully they will continue to work hard on improving both their internal and external resources.

One much-needed improvement that comes to mind for me is improved user forums. Not many software vendors spend enough time on developing and supporting their user forums (including Microsoft), but ESRI could make just a few simple changes and greatly increase the value of their forums. Also, how about a support wiki? Both of these tools (forums and wikis) are a great way to capture user knowledge and allow users to share their hard-earned experience with others.

Just a thought.