"No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world"
- Robin Williams
We know that the best ideas for RM Unify development come from the people using the product. That's why we have overhauled our Roadmap to make sure we are better able to reflect the needs and wants of end users. In release 3.46 you will find a couple of new links from the help area within the RM Unify UI to this end.
Firstly you will find a new 'Ideas' link. This will take you to a new Ideas Portal. Here you will find a bunch of ideas already populated for your consideration. These have largely come from our customer base. In each case you will have the opportunity to hit the 'want' button to explain why you think this is a great idea. Don't worry, your feedback is not shared publicly but is used here at RM to help us to better assess just how great any idea really is.
In the Ideas Portal you also have the ability to submit your own ideas. The more detail the better here. We will take a look at them and once assessed will post them back to the portal for others to evaluate.
The second new link you will see is "What's Next?" which takes you out to our new roadmap. Note that this is the first iteration and expect to see a number of changes over the next few week – not least some colour!. Crucially, this is now linked to the Ideas Portal. The very best ideas will find their way into one of the Ideas Buckets. At this point they are competing against all the other ideas in all the other buckets. We will leave them up on the Ideas Portal to continue getting feedback.
Getting out of the Ideas Bucket and into development is the final hurdle for any great idea. We know it can be really frustrating when an idea you are focused on seems to be 'stuck'. With limited development resource it is always going to be the case that we can't do everything at once, which takes us back to the ideas portal and why it is so important for everyone to share their thoughts.
Once an idea is in development, the timeline for release can vary depending on the complexity of the requirements, competing developments or simply unforeseen events. A good example of this is when a change at Microsoft or Google forces a change to an idea in RM Unify development resulting in a delay or even a complete re-consideration. This means that ideas in development will start in the 3 - 6 month time estimate channel. It is only when we have a higher degree of certainty that we move the idea into the final channel with a <3 months release estimate. If your idea gets to this point, we are confident it will happen in the next couple of RM Unify releases (releases happen on average every 5/6 weeks).
Of course this isn’t the only way you can influence the RM Unify roadmap. Customers should continue to share product ideas and opinions with their RM Education contacts who will also be contributing to the same ideas portal. A great place to do this is at the upcoming RM Seminars where the RM Unify Product Manager will be in attendance.
Finally, the ideas you see today and the roadmap they feed are by their very nature subject to a high degree of change. We hope to have lots of ideas and therefore lots of activity here. Make sure you visit regularly to influence the product.
RM Unify v3.48 - Important Notice
One of the changes in our next planned release, RM Unify v3.48, will be to remove support for older versions of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in line with similar changes that Microsoft are making to O365.
We’ve provided more information about this change and how to prepare it here: https://www.rm.com/blog/2018/july/rm-unify-and-tls-update. Internet Explorer users will need to be using the latest version - IE11 - to access both O365 and RM Unify so we strongly recommend that you upgrade any computers that may not already have the most up-to-date version.