Introduction

The initial release of the Acquia Network is now operational and subscribers are receiving support, blocking spam, monitoring uptime, and receiving software updates.  We're taken a strong first step toward realizing our vision of delivering value-added services that complete the Drupal experience, but where do we go from here? To answer that question, we need your suggestions and feedback.  As of this writing, we are exploring several different directions for expanding the Acquia Network, and we would like your feedback and suggestions to help us prioritize them:

1. Add new network services that help site owners manage their site
2. Add new network services that help site owners add new functionality to their site
3. Expand the depth and breadth of documentation provided to subscribers
4. Enhance the support delivery system to support more contact channels and streamline the support process

New Network Services

We think that adding new network services to the Acquia Network is one of the best ways to deliver more value to subscribers.  New services under consideration include the following.

1. Search service that provides deep, semantically-aware search of your content and integrates fully with your site look and feel.
2. Audio/Video service that offers audio/video uploading, transcoding, and delivery within your Acquial Drupal site.
3. Performance monitoring (potentially from multiple locations on the Internet) and diagnostic service that detects performance problems and provides pointers to how to address them.
4. Security penetration testing service that diagnoses potential security vulnerabilities on your Acquia Drupal site and offers suggestions for how to address the issues.
5. 404 detection service that alerts you to page not found errors on your Acquia Drupal site.
6. Taxonomy service that delivers high quality vocabularies on demand to assist content contributors with accurate content classification.

Existing Network Services

The Acquia Network includes several network services that could be expanded and enhanced in order to deliver more value to subscribers. 
Specific ideas under consideration include.

1. Expand the update notification service into a full-fledged upgrade management system that not only provides notifications, but also completes the upgrade process in situations where doing so is practical and desirable.
2. Enhance the heartbeat uptime monitoring system to measure response time from multiple locations, and provide deeper content-aware uptime monitoring that goes beyond what can be established through cron runs only.
3. Enhance the modification detection service to more intelligently detect "known safe" vs. "unsafe" code modifications.

These are just a few of the ideas we have in this area, and we would welcome your feedback and suggestions for other improvements.

Documentation

We currently provide the Getting Started guide to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.  Over time, we plan to expand the library of documentation available only to subscribers.  Premium knowledge assets are something that we think people are willing to pay for, as long as the content truly saves time and avoids costly mistakes.  Our ideas for future documentation projects include:

1. Electronic versions of popular Drupal books from leading publishers in complete or partial form
2. How to use Acquia Drupal (includes key Drupal concepts, how to use key features in Drupal core, how to use modules included in Acquia Drupal, and other key considerations)
3. Performance Benchmarks and Sizing Guide that quantifies Drupal scalability and provides guidelines for how much hardware to provision to deliver various levels of traffic
   
4. Performance Analysis and Tuning Guide that describes best practices for diagnosing performance issues and configuring Acquia Drupal systems for optimal performance
5. Acquia Drupal Security Best Practices Guide that describes the best practices for maintaining secure installations of Acquia Drupal
6. Migration Guide that explains the steps for migrating a site from Drupal 5 to Acquia Drupal
   
7. Solution Cookbooks that describe how to use Acquia Drupal to deliver specific kinds of solutions for common use cases
8. In Depth Drupal Case Studies that describe successful real-world deployments of Acquia Drupal including functional requirements, team structure, development processes and environment, deployment architecture, staging and deployment processes, and operations and maintenance processes.
9. Task-specific online help, either on specific Drupal pages (context-sensitive) or in a centralized knowledge base.

The above are just ideas at this point, and we would welcome your feedback on which of the above would be most valuable.  And if we've omitted something you would expect to see, please let us know that too.

Support Delivery System

We plan to continue to enhance the support delivery system on the Acquia Network both behind the scenes and in ways that directly enhance the experience for subscribers.  A few areas that we are looking at include:

1. Addition of SMS delivery of messages, tasks, and ticket updates.
2. Addition of live chat as a contact method (in addition to web, email, and phone).
3. Ways to integrate Acquia's support ticket system with the ticket / support systems of our partners (website developers).

Initial engagement, purchase and Setup

Customers need a way to experience the value provided by the Acquia Network without committing to a full subscription - even if the lowest level subscription is free.  Improvements are needed in:

1. Creating ways for non-customers to gain some value from the Network prior to subscribing.
2. Encouraging customers at lower subscription levels to try out and use services offered at premium service levels as part of an upgrade evaluation.

Also, the purchase and setup process we offer today is functional, but we are looking make improvements in several areas:

1. There are too many opportunities for error in the process of procuring subscription keys and entering the keys into Acquia Drupal.
   
2. The installation of Drupal happens separately from the creation of a subscription.  Should they be joined in some way?
3. The matrix of subscription choices can be daunting.  Is there a better way to present this information through a configurator or interview wizard?

General Usability Improvements

The general usability of the Acquia Network could be improved in many ways.  We are looking at hundreds of minor improvements that will enhance the subscriber experience, but there are a few key areas where we would like to solicit feedback.

1. The subtle interplay between Messages and Tasks is easy to miss.  How should these features be improved?
   
2. The Task management feature may be redundant for customers who already have established operations issue management procedures.  Should this feature be expanded, modified, or eliminated?
3. Some subscribers have only one subscriptions whereas others have many.  How can we balance the user experience requirements of both groups without undue compromise?