As a product manager, I regularly receive questions about our products, but occasionally someone will ask about our "user groups and forums." Let me tell you about that. ;-)

SDL Web has both official and ad-hoc, organically created user groups and forums including two annual Developer Summits, user groups in Europe and the US, a Tridion Stack Exchange site, and the SDL Web-related groups on SDL Community.

This includes:

• Tridion Developer Summit in the Netherlands (usually around May)
• Tridion Developer Summit in India (city varies)
• User groups
  • Netherlands (Benelux)
  • US
    • New England
    • Ohio Valley
    • West Coast
• Tridion Stack Exchange
• SDL Web on SDL Community (this group and its subgroups)
• SDL Tridion World site and forum (since retired)

SDL itself has also sponsored hack-a-thons, runs the MVP community award program, and often hosts or participates in community-facing webinars. Organically the community also has everything you'd also expect: blogs, podcasts, and videos. When we start debating icon colors, you know the threshold from brand loyalists to brand defenders has been crossed.

Started in 2001, the old SDL Tridion World forum (since retired) was a private forum that eventually had:

• 2,325 registered users
• Some 12,117 posts by the top 10 over 12 years
• The typical "long tail" of visitors with a few dozen to a few hundred posts each
• Some users that continue to participate in the community for over a decade

See my post on this.

We eventually closed our forum sometime after the creators of Stack Overflow launched its Stack Exchange network of Question and Answer sites. A Tridion StackExchange was too compelling to not start our own! Our stats as of November 4, 2016 include: 

• 3 questions per day
• 92% answered
• 240 avid users 1,723 total users
• 1.7 answer ratio
• 568 visits/day

“Beta” just means that site isn't big enough to get our own banner, but StackExchange isn’t going to close it down anytime soon. We did get the attention of Joel Splonsky in the Stack Overflow Podcast #46 (see 4:58 in the context of small sites that don't want have anything to do with each other).

So that's forums and user groups. I could also describe our open source projects, but I started that list earlier with the help of the Tridion StackExchange community.

I've created "community in 30 60 second" videos and we've attempted to do weekly summaries. But I hesitate at creating these types of posts because every time I look the community has grown or started something new and it's challenging for one person to keep up. So no promises on the next community overview post.

But let me challenge you. Do you have a favorite (StackExchange) query, RSS feed, Slack plugin, or way to follow our community? Share in the comments or maybe start a community project for following the community.

And if you're not that active but would like to do more in the SDL Web/Tridion community, see my post on how to use this community.