Final shutdown and removal of Astaro.org

Sorry I am late to the party, but I would like to add my voice to the chorus regarding the change from astaro.org to community.sophos.com.

Simply put, the new forums:

* Make it much harder to find what I am searching for.
* Make it much harder to find threads of interest to me, and to follow their progress when I find them.
* Make it harder to see what is new and what has changed in the various forum categories.
* Are formatted with a much lower density of useful, usable information on the screen. The result is that I miss a lot.

Overall, the changes have resulted in a significant degradation of the overall quality and utility of the forums. From my point of view, it seems that all of the work has been applied to migrating the information and closing down the old astaro.org forums.

In my humble opinion, these forum changes have done incalculable damage to Sophos. The full impact of that damage will not be felt immediately. As sales decline and Sophos management struggles to grasp the reasons behind the decline, I doubt that they will recognize how much impact these forum changes have had on that decline.

The messages to me are:

* Sophos does not listen to its customers.
* Sophos does not value those highly experienced customers who do so much to contribute to Sophos' bottom line. Those experienced customers are uncompensated and operate behind the scenes, providing a valued service that helps bootstrap new customers from apprentices to experienced users. It is a multiplicative factor that drives sales. Lose them, and you lose a lot more than just the value of their Sophos product and service purchases.
* Someone at Sophos has convinced Sophos' executives and management that the forums changes are essential to Sophos future. That person or persons are proceeding full steam ahead without adequate supervision and proper ongoing assessment. Nobody at Sophos is willing to admit that they erred, and commit to changing the plan. I have no data to back it up, but I suspect that the budget for this activity is mostly spent, and there are not enough resources available to fix the serious issues that have arisen.

Since it is clear that Sophos is determined to follow through with these changes, I strongly urge Sophos to budget twice the time and money that they budgeted to migration, and apply it to implementing improvements that result in real world improvements in usability, quality, and utility for its users, who are Sophos' most valued customers.

>the new forum format is not user friendly at all. Finding information is very difficult.

Agreed. I spent a much longer than should be normal to find that the latest firmware is a dud. I would have skipped it altogether back int he astaro days.

Newer != Better

Hi Ruckus and Sophos Community..,

i fully agree with the guru´s Bob, Scott and others.
I don´t know what the real reasons are, but it seems Sophos want to shot all UTM things to the moon and forget it.
1) Released "BETA" Versions 9.3 and 9.5
2) Shutted down astaro.org
3) Praises XG appliances as "the solution"

But this strategy will fail, cause one thing will be lost during these steps: THE USERS.
And at least THE CUSTOMERS!!!

Regards
Thomas

I am in with the others on this...so sad you are shutting down astaro.org, when you could have upgraded the vBulletin to the newest version and preserved everything.
Zimbra Collaboration, as you use now for Sophos Community, is NO WAY near vBulletin.
I'm not just a guy who can't deal with new systems, I love them...if they are better! But I am so lost with this new community, lack of navigation, big fonts and most of all, I feel that I drown in information, lacking the visibility to see the light :-(

Please Sophos - remember how the former ASG and now UTM product got so popular - it WAS because of the community! - And not just a community, but THE BEST community, that has ever existed for such a product.

Don't destroy it by "killing" faithfull contributers, who will stop doing what they do, and leave the community to the more "light" users, who has no where else to go. - maybe they will start a community of their own someday...

Thanks for the clear explanation. I was having a hard time expressing the exact same thing. We end up at google not because we don't know where the search functionality is, it seems a lot easier saying [ email tld balfson astaro.org ] in google to get the result much faster than any other method.

Regards

Yes, search works better in the Sophos Community than it did on astaro.org. Google is superior to both and does indeed find things in both sites.

The problem is that one doesn't remember enough about the thread to be specific enough in the search criteria, so one often needs to glance at four, five or more suggested threads to find the one post that solves the problem. Community.sophos.com serves pages up so slowly that it's impractical to try to run through a half-dozen threads. Well, that and the often-discussed issues of the size of the typeface, the lack of navigation tools, etc.

Cheers - Bob

I and Sophos do care about your comments and your suggestions. It takes time for us to implement changes and it is very evident that the Astaro forum and the Sophos Community are very different platforms. There are going to bumps along the way and new things to learn. Those bumps are being worked on but it won't be as quickly as everyone would like. We will need to design, implement, test and release - much like any other project is managed.

Ruckus and I are championing your suggestions and working with a number of folks to get changes done to improve the experience. Search, UX/UI, ease of use, communication etc... are all on our to-do.

We have another release of features coming up that we know will improve the experiences and we will continue to do so until our community members have a great experience. The plan to take the Astaro.org offline on Jan 20 will proceed and we will continue to improve this Community based on your feedback.

If you need to contact me directly, feel free to PM me and we'll get on a call.

Billybob said:

About the missing images, I was referring to my post here https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/67/t/58158 which doesn't make any sense without the attached images. I am glad all the images are sitting together somewhere but without proper context they are useless but whatever.

Thanks.  Fixed.  Yes, only one got transferred and the rest were in the media gallery.  And I apologize for not explaining how you would find them.  If you spot a post with missing attachments you can go copy the thread/post ID, go to the Astaro.org group media gallery, and search for the ID to locate all the missing ones.  Example:

We do intend to fix the missing attachments for recent threads, but it's got a bit delayed.

I am glad you found it ruckus but most of us are not as good as you are[:P]

This is always the way I have searched astaro.org content using google search and I get these results

Initially when I searched for that post a few days ago, I couldn't find it anywhere beside the astaro.org website. The original link as posted gives a 404 but the archive astaro.org? https://www.astaro.org/archive/t-59001.html  shows up in google results.

About the missing images, I was referring to my post here https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/67/t/58158 which doesn't make any sense without the attached images. I am glad all the images are sitting together somewhere but without proper context they are useless but whatever.