IdeaStorm: Ideas in Action

  • IdeaStorm Recap 7-17-08

    Thu. Jul. 17, 2008
    by Vida Killian, IdeaStorm Manager

    First of all, I wanted to give an update on the IdeaStorm team at Dell and introduce myself.  As many of you already know, Dawn_L has decided to move on from Dell to pursue a new opportunity.  Kara_K is also moving on, but we are happy that she is staying both at Dell and on our team to be the Small Business online community manager.  Jackie_C will continue to be our IdeaStorm admin (thank you Jackie!!!).  You also may or may not know that we also have a larger extended community team that participates in conversations across the Dell Blogs, Dell Forums, IdeaStorm, Twitter, and the web in general.  You can read more about everyone here on our team bio page. 

    That leaves me with the official title of "IdeaStorm Manager."  I'm not a big fan of titles as you can read in my bio since I will respond to almost anything.  I am really excited to take on the task of making sure your suggestions get in front of all the right people at Dell.  I have been at Dell for over nine years and working in this "Community world" for the last two.  Everything I have done thus far has been pretty much in the back office, so you haven't seen much of me online. But, I'm happy to start now and look forward to getting to know everyone.  Feel free to come and chat with me in the Storm Room or connect with me on Twitter @VidaK. 

    I also wanted to make sure I got this post out so I could to respond to badblood's idea for an update on the IdeaStorm team.  You'll see this one change to Implemented shortly after this post!  You'll be hearing more from me in the coming weeks, but getting down to business, here are the updates I can share right now....

    People:

    It's been a busy month with over 1000 new registered users!  Welcome to roderic8, tramainejones28, ksnipersixfour, whackatak, dermatologist, and pepperoni to name a few. 

    Updates:

    jlp2cool's idea for a lap pad was updated to Already Offered - so check it out.

    We Partially Implemented jervis961's idea for the Dell community site based on the changes recently made to the www.dell.com home page.  If you haven't paid attention lately - have a look at the new face of Dell.

    And last for now, but definitely not least, you may have read about Dell's new multi-touch functionality being added to the Latitude XT (aka Tablet PC).  We've had quite a few ideas around this concept that have been updated to Partially Implemented since it is not available on every display, but you can have the option if you buy a tablet or upgrade if you already own one.

    Make Touch Screens Optional on All Computers

    Multi-touchscreen

    Buy Touchscreen computers and laptops

    Stay tuned for more updates as I get caught up!

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  • Weekly Recap 7-2-08

    Wed. Jul. 02, 2008
    by Dawn Lacallade, Idea Gal

    Thanks for everyone's patience with the challenges we have had with the ideas in action page.  Here is the latest on IdeaStorm! 

    People: 

    We have had a bunch of new ideas and a crew of new people visiting the site.  Welcome to meand3ts, n64bomb, oligarch, voice99, and bobinlou.  I was especially excited by the ideas, comments and votes by new user ringas85.  This week we were happy to see new members from the Steve Harvey show!  A special hello to popz2049 and candacemichelle_1, we look forward to hearing all you ideas!

    Ideas:

    Several ideas continue to drive a lot of conversation from our community. For the past month our members have discussed why Dell should ship products with no more plastic wrap. Also, ideas on optical mice and GPU upgrades have gotten many IdeaStormers talking.

    Updates:

    Several new things to update you all on:  First, I am sure you saw the recent posts about the new Studio series of laptops that will fit nicely into the lineup between the Inspiron and the XPS laptops.  As we have before, we continue to include the features you tell us are important including the low profile design, colors, fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard and the new Dell Dock.  Ok, so that stuff is cool... but myself... I am dying to try the new video chat.  Would love to have that for my friends!  If anyone has tried it... please share!

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  • Your Tech Team – Dedicated Support Teams

    Tue. Jul. 01, 2008
    by Kara Krautter, Small Business Community Manager

    We're excited to share a new service offering beginning today called "Your Tech Team".  This offering has a couple of key components that the IdeaStorm community has overwhelmingly asked for: one contact point for all your needs, Americas-based support and faster response times. Your Tech Team provides household support by an advanced support team in North America for one year. Customer feedback from the Lightning Rod back in May of last year, the NYC area pilot, and several other service improvement ideas from IdeaStorm directly influenced what this service will include.

    For more details, see the post from Laura Bosworth on Direct2Dell.

    Link back to the idea: Hello Again - Dedicated Teams

    Here are just a few of the 50+ other related ideas:

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  • (PRODUCT) RED

    Fri. Jun. 27, 2008
    by Kara Krautter, Small Business Community Manager

    Dell is committed to global citizenship. As an extension of this commitment, we are excited to share Dell's participation in (PRODUCT) RED, thanks in part to the idea smotchberry submitted back in February of last year. Smotchberry has become the first IdeaStorm community member to have two Ideas in Action (first was Carbon Neutral). These ideas help us to continue to contribute both to environment and the health needs of our world.

    Beginning today when you purchase any of Dell's (PRODUCT) RED branded products you contribute to the Global Fund. Check out Lionel's post for more details on how you can contribute with Dell. This seemingly simple idea is a great way for Dell to help make a big impact on the fight against AIDS in Africa.

    Since the Global Fund provides medications that literally turn around peoples' lives and health, Dell is pleased to make a donation to the Global Fund in smotchberry's name. This donation will provide almost one year of treatment for someone living with AIDS in Africa. 

    Keep those great ideas coming and see how Dell and customers can team up to make a difference!

    Link back to the idea:  Product Red

    Update 6-27-08: Starting today, you now have more ways to help the Global Fund fight AIDS in Africa with Dell and (RED). After the initial launch of Dell's (PRODUCT) RED offerings, we got a lot of feedback from the IdeaStorm community about how we could allow more customers the opportunity to contribute.  Thanks to programatix, jaylus12 and the rest of our IdeaStormers for providing some great feedback on how we could improve PRODUCT (RED). Keep up the great ideas!

    Link back to the ideas:Make PRODUCT RED as an item in system configuration ; DELL shouldn't charge $150 more for their (PRODUCT)RED model

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  • Weekly Recap 6-10-08

    Tue. Jun. 10, 2008
    by Dawn Lacallade, Idea Gal

    Update from Lionel: This post was supposed to appear only in the Ideas in Action category. However, the functionality to post only in a category is still not working properly. We are working to fix this issue, but since it will take some time, I posted this on the main Direct2Dell homepage. My apologies for the inconvenience.

    Stormers - Thanks for the patience with the Ideas in Action glitch.  Here is the mega update I promised. 

    People: 

    This has been a busy couple of weeks!  We had almost 250 ideas submitted and more than 225 new IdeaStorm users in the past two weeks.  It’s great to see Dave (davnmc) and Petzy again in StormRoom and badblood back on the site!  A special welcome to a few new IdeaStormers natakuc4, idangold and inkslug!

    Gaining Momentum:

    If you Stormers out there have not taken the time to review these growing ideas… you might want to take a look! 

    Hotswappable Laptop Batteries

    No more plastic wrap please

    Updates:

    So you guys have impressed me, again!  Not only is Dell listening, but now Wal-Mart is listening too!  Recently they announced upcoming changes in their retail displays for customers.   The ongoing discussion about power cords continues to drive a lot of conversation; you should take a look if you haven’t already.  If you are feeling creative, (and want to lend your thoughts) please join the brainstorm on both desk level monitors and hygienic keyboards.  All the chatter on ideas about using less plastic in computers has kept todd_d quite busy.

    The Inspiron Mini has been a topic of much debate and interest.  The Gizmodo post started a flurry of new ideas below.  We have shared all of this feedback with the design team and will share more info as we have it. 

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  • Awards and Reviews Site

    Thu. Jun. 05, 2008
    by Kara Krautter, Small Business Community Manager

    This week we launched a revamped Awards and Reviews site on Dell.com. Customers and employees can browse and research our products on www.dell.com/awards through reviews, awards, customer and employee ratings, videos, photos and more. This new site contributes a range of content that both customers and the industry have asked to be a part of the product research experience.

    Thanks to jervis961 and the rest of the IdeaStorm community for telling us how a site like this could help keep our customers better informed on our products.

    Link back to the idea: Post links to professional reviews of Dell products

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  • Weekly Recap 5-22-08

    Thu. May. 22, 2008
    by Kara Krautter, Small Business Community Manager

    Short and sweet this week:

    Welcome to New Users!

    This week our community grew by more than 230 new members. A special thanks to drewness and binarygrind for really jumping in and really participating!

    Number of ideas

    More than 65 new ideas were submitted over the last week (several that focus on improvements for XPS). It seems like we’ve set a good pace of about 60 new ideas every week.

    Gaining Momentum

    After several members shared their opinions, our own chris_m joined the conversation to give the community his thoughts on a 24 inch XPS One. Also, it seems like the community agrees with ccpljat about higher screen resolution, but there hasn’t been a lot of discussion around the idea.

    New survey

    What to tell us how you really feel? Just click on the link above the search on the IdeaStorm header or here to fill out the short survey. We would like feedback on how we can better engage, entertain and serve the Dell Community. So, please let us know your thoughts on how we can improve our current sites.

    And, just for fun: Our own IdeaGal Dawn Lacallade presented at the Community 2.0 Conference last week. Jim Storer spent some time chatting with Dawn about IdeaStorm and idea management. Check out the podcast!

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  • Weekly Recap 5-14-08

    Wed. May. 14, 2008
    by Kara Krautter, Small Business Community Manager

    Over the past week, the IdeaStorm team has been discussing and researching innovation and idea management a little more than usual. This fervor was due in part to the suggestions of pmdigangi on Making IdeaStorm Even Better but also by a surge of innovation conversations in the blogosphere. Dawn provided the community with some thoughts on innovating the idea management process for IdeaStorm.

    Creating a sustainable idea and innovation management process is one of our priorities at Dell, especially for Community. There are some that see our site as a fad (just a combination of social networking tools and innovation software), which could fall victim to the same issues of traditional suggestion boxes. Jeffrey Phillips of Innovate on Purpose states several reasons why just “following the crowds” is not necessarily innovative. I somewhat agree with his take on this since listening to customers is an important piece for innovation management, but not the whole story.

    Almost 9,000 ideas from IdeaStorm (more than 60 in the past week) is a bit overwhelming, but we continuously improve how the team categorizes and prioritizes the ideas to ensure relevant feedback gets to the right groups within Dell. As Piers Jones of Feed Need noted, with a lot of ideas it can be difficult to identify the suggestions that can provide the greatest benefit. Our process flow allows for a variety of idea topics (ideas that our customers believe are important and suggestions about what we believe are significant) to flow to the correct parts of the business for evaluation. The business evaluation is critical to the innovation process because that is where we are able to take customer feedback and integrate it into new products and services.

    And, for a bit of IdeaStorm News of the Weird, our site is being used as an exercise in text analytics and linguistics.

    Welcome to New Users!

    In the past week, IdeaStorm has gained more than 240 new members. A special call out to mauribe, goldschool, newhard2009, phil.christs, and mdevoucoux; they each contributed at least one idea and numerous votes during their first week as members. It’s great to see new users becoming a part of our community!

    Gaining Momentum

    There was also a lot of chatter about system options for customers purchasing online. Both winoffice and jamesmoroni1 submitted ideas about the different channels on dell.com. Robert_p weighed in on the conversation to clear up some of the confusion, which prompted jmxz to create a new idea about better informing customers all their purchase options.

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  • Weekly Recap 5-7-08

    Thu. May. 08, 2008
    by Dawn Lacallade, Idea Gal

    It has been a busy week for us around Ideastorm!  Here are a couple of the "usual" updates and a couple of new components thanks to Jervis' wonderful suggestions.

    The Usual- The happenings of the week.

    As you scroll down you will see the more detailed review of the Ideastorm contributions to the newly announced XPS 730.  Man, you guys are great designers!  In the continued pursuit of cleaning up old ideas, we updated webcams and graphics cards.  Robert_P has been joining the discussion for several weeks as the Small Business Liaison and this week he chimed in on the debate about Dell Small Business Vs Dell Home.  The past several weeks have shown us in both Dell sites as well as broadly across the blogosphere that the desire to keep XP is as hot as ever.  Dell has responded with an update on how we will continue to offer XP.  Last but probably most intriguing is the launch of Dell's newest blog last week.  Yourblog is a place where you can drive the agenda and even author blogs for Dell.  We would love to have you contribute! 

    How about some introductions to the Community team at Dell?  This week we launched the beginning phase of a bio page on the all of the usual suspects. 

    In the outside world, we have been watching a growing debate about the uses of Ideastorm like sites for various business uses for several weeks in this update.  Most recently there has been a growing list of companies getting involved in creating new platforms to host these sites and a hot debate about the merit of these companies.  

    Welcome to new users!

    The Ideastorm would like to welcome all of the 200+ new users we saw last week!  We noticed a couple of new users who jumped in head first like sa2008 who had 1 idea, 11 comments, 8 votes and jamesmoroni1 who had 3 ideas, 7 votes!  We had more than 75 new ideas last week and had several ideas that gained much momentum. 

    Gaining Momentum-  Ideas on the up and up

    Did you catch the recent news that Dell is moving away from our build to order infinite configuration model?  Ideastorm users continued to find this idea was of much concern.  I am sure no one missed the patriotic streak we had on Ideastorm last week.  It began and quickly spread to showed that patriotic colors take many forms.  We also saw an idea that shared the need for less gain some speed. 

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  • Don't Eliminate XP Just Yet

    Thu. May. 01, 2008
    by Caroline Dietz, IdeaStorm Manager

    We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings. Based on your feedback, the following Dell consumer systems with Windows XP are now immediately available on Dell.com:

    These systems offer two flavors of Windows XP - Home and Pro. We appreciate the continued feedback from the IdeaStorm community. Keep ‘em coming! (4-18-07)

    Update 4-15-08: We are also offering XP for Small Business Customers which you can read more about here.

    Update 5-1-08: Unsure about XP End of Life or the Vista Downgrade? Check out this post from Jenni Doane, Global SMB Software Manager.   

    Back to the idea:  Don't Eliminate XP Just Yet

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