For the past three months, I have been posting on Mondays and Tuesdays with links to other Acumatica-related articles. I was following the pattern of Mark Polino who is one of the prominent bloggers in the Microsoft Dynamics GP community. Mark regularly posts links to other blog articles on his blog (click here).
The GP community is a great example of what it takes to make an ERP product successful. GP is built on an old technology platform from the 1980s, yet it continues to enjoy a very strong customer base. Why is this? Well, I’m sure the fact that Microsoft now owns it doesn’t hurt. But, I think a bigger reason is that there is a large community of users who share information with each other. Great Plains (GP) was created in the early 1980s and it still has a large customer following in spite of the very old technology platform that it is built on. I believe that GP is strong because of its strong community. They even have their own annual user conference, complete with fancy website (click here). Anyways, the point is that I respect Mark Polino and the community that he and others have built around an ERP product. Ultimately, an ERP product is about people, not technology, and a community brings those people together.
Now, if Dynamics GP could be so successful with old technology and a great community, just think about how successful Acumatica could be with new technology and a great community! Acumatica was carefully crafted on modern technology from the ground up. Developers love it and there is already a budding developer community for people who want to build cool stuff on the Acumatica platform. But what about the user community? This is still in the infant stages, but I believe that it will take shape very quickly over the next few years as Acumatica continues to grow exponentially.
So all this was going through my head when I began to link to other blog posts a few months ago. Basically, I was just imitating Mark Polino. However, I found that these kind of posts began to clutter up the Perpetual Acumatica Learner blog and make things more blurry. Mark’s blog is even more cluttered than mine; last month he made almost 80 posts (click here). For me, the Monday/Tuesday posts began to detract from the real point of this blog which is to post about my personal Acumatica learning journey with substantive, meaty, 500-1,000 word posts. I’ve been doing this on Thursdays, but the Monday and Tuesday posts had begun to occupy more and more of my time. Then I found myself getting drawn into Acumatica-related news which completely distracted me from focusing on learning the product. The news is great, but it’s more “fluffy” in nature, not “meaty” like the posts that I’m striving to create on this blog. Both are needed of course. Thankfully, Richard Duffy already has the news side of things covered with a daily paper that you can subscribe to (click here).
As far as a community goes, blogging is just a piece of the community. Probably a more important piece is the discussion forum. This is already a place for Acumatica users over on LinkedIn (click here). I even posted over there about why I think LinkedIn is the perfect place for this kind of discussion forum (click here). So we are well on our way to building a solid Acumatica community on the internet. In the future, as Acumatica continues to gain traction in the market, I expect we’ll see more and more discussion on the LinkedIn group, more new Acumatica-specific blogs, and even a conference for Acumatica users to meet face-to-face.
For now I’m going to drop the posts on Monday and Tuesday. I’ll focus on one Thursday post each week with the goal of posting something substantial for anyone else out there who, like me, is learning Acumatica and might benefit from the information. This is my first blog and it has been quite a learning experience, but I want to refocus by steering my learning ship away from “learning about blogging” and back towards “learning about Acumatica.”
As far as my desire to provide a reference to other Acumatica learning material out there, I have added a page to the top of this site entitled Resources which lists the Acumatica learning resources that I am aware of. Please feel free to comment on the page and suggest other resources that I am not aware of so I can add them.
Thanks for the kind words. I’ll avoid any competitive comments and just keep this to blogging. After doing this for a long time, it seems like there’s generally only room for one high volume ‘news’ site within a particular niche. I stole the format from Instapundit so he gets the credit. I don’t think it matters whether you go for high quantity short posts or longer, less frequent, more substantive posts . What matters is that you pick one and build your reputation on that. Keep up the hard work.
Mark
Wow, I’m honored to get a comment from Mark Polino on this blog. Thanks Mark!
And you were even willing to share some words of wisdom, despite the fact that Acumatica and Dynamics GP are competing products. I have to say, that’s very classy of you.
Even though Acumatica and Dynamics GP are competing products, I think that 60%-80% of the skillset possessed by a good ERP professional is product agnostic. Do you agree?
I have to agree with you about picking your format and sticking with it. This whole blogging thing is new to me, but it seems like the most important thing is consistency. That’s what I’ve valued the most about your blog for the past few years. I know what to expect and your niche is clearly defined.
I think I’ve found my format. Now comes the hard part of plodding along for the next few years to establish it.