Last year, Paul, our fearless CEO, did a couple of Q&A webinars with Jeffrey Palermo over at ClearMeasure. Later in the year, Derek Campbell, Ryan Rousseau and I did a webinar on how to speed up, scale out, and organize your Octopus Deploy server. And that is to name a few. We did a handful more throughout the year.
Hopefully, they were a great learning experience for you. The webinars were also a great learning experience for us as a company. The first thing we learned was...there is a lot of preparation that went into making a high-quality webinar. An hour of prepared content, including demos, slide deck, and practice, took anywhere from 30-60 hours. Which makes sense. Webinars are designed to provide a deep dive into a specific feature.
The other thing we noticed was while people got a lot of value out of the prepared content, but there was a lot of Q&A at the end. Some of the questions were related to the webinar topic. Other questions, well, not so much. They were still great questions and we were more than happy to answer them. Often times the answers to the questions were pretty easy to demo and took only a few minutes.
We see a lot of support tickets come in which are more on the "how do I do something with Octopus Deploy" and less on the "please help me, my instance is broken." A lot of those questions we get are in the same vein as the line of questions we got at the end of each of our webinars. They take a bit longer to answer than a few minutes. It takes a while to type out a response and get screenshots together.
Some of the questions we get are helpful for the entire Octopus Deploy community. This got us thinking, wouldn't it be great to share answers to those questions with the community? We still want to do webinars, but they require a large time commitment (1+ hours) from both the presenter and the viewer. It would be nice to have a shorter video to answer these questions. We can show something in five minutes and it could help a user save hours. And it would be great to give someone a link to a video containing the answer to their question.
This is why we are happy to announce our weekly Ask Octopus Video Series. A few of us at Octopus Deploy will take some of the more interesting questions we got asked from the previous week and walk through the answer. Each video will be between 5 and 20 minutes, depending on the questions being asked. Our goal is to release a new video every Friday.
In our first video, Derek answers the question we have been getting quite a bit in the past month, "what is the LTS release and how can I benefit from it?" Ryan follows up with "how do I upgrade my tentacles for a specific environment?" I finish the discussion with the question, "how do I test a change to my process without affecting everyone else?"
Our plan for this series is to start simple. We will answer your questions that we get asked through our usual support channels. Based on the feedback we get from the community we will adjust. In a years time, this series could look exactly the same or completely different.
That being said, if you have any burning questions you would like answered or if you have feedback in general, please send it over to support@octopus.com.
