This blog post was originally published on September 23, 2020.
The Oracle APEX community is highly respected at Oracle. It is a shining example of a vibrant, growing, developer community comprised of talented and helpful individuals around the globe, all with a common interest. Not only is the APEX community interested in their own personal success, but they are also keenly interested in the growth and success of the APEX community as a whole.
I’ve been asked to document for my management why the APEX community is so successful. This isn’t an easy task, because sometimes I feel like the community just “is”. Thousands of people are responsible for what the APEX community is today, and it can’t be traced to a single person or action. The APEX community has produced dedicated conferences, webinars, podcasts, magazine articles, Slack discussion groups, Web sites, plug-ins, commercial software, videos, books, tutorials, open source projects, training courses, hackathons, Meetup groups and more. Everyone has contributed. However, I do believe there are a few key factors which have contributed to the success of the community, and I would like to highlight a number of them below.
We desire your feedback and guidance, please. At the end of this blog post, we ask for your advice what actions a technology company should make to help form a new technology community.
Customer Focus
Every customer should be treated like gold, regardless of size or revenue, and should be given world-class service. We strive to ensure that our customers are successful. Our APEX team is singularly focused on the success of our customers and we look at every interaction we have with a customer as an opportunity to show our character, responsiveness and professionalism. We never want APEX or Oracle to be an impediment to someone, but instead, simply be an aid to their success.
This interaction often occurs in a support scenario. Someone will raise an issue to the Oracle APEX team, either indirectly through Oracle Support, or directly through email or social media. We will evaluate the issue as soon as possible, and immediately try to identify an alternate method to a solution. If that is not possible, we will attempt to develop, test and deliver a fix to the customer as quickly as possible. This isn’t always practical, and not every issue raised requires an immediate fix. But in those situations where the customer states that this is critical for them and on the critical path to their success, we will work very hard to provide a timely solution to the customer. We have done this for hundreds of customers.
Also related to customer focus, the Oracle APEX team has consistently focused on not creating work for our customers, especially with respect to upgrades. Since the very first release of APEX, we have focused on forward compatibility. We have expended an extraordinary amount of resources to ensure that an upgrade of APEX does not impact the functionality or operation of APEX applications from an earlier version. When a customer upgrades the underlying APEX engine, the existing applications should look and feel and run exactly as they did before. If they do not, then this is unplanned cost and time for our customers. Forward compatibility is difficult to achieve, and it has not been practical to perfectly achieve this, but we’re close to 100% and this has always been of paramount importance to us. This, too, is a reflection of our customer focus.
How does customer focus help with the growth of a community? Easy. Our goals are aligned with our customer’s goals. Both the customer and the Oracle APEX team are committed to the customer’s success. We have developed a reputation for world class service, and our customers have quickly realized that we are there to help them succeed. It also develops a sense of trust by the customer, because they know if they are to use APEX for the next project, the Oracle APEX team is likewise there to support them.
Customer focus is something that is difficult to teach. It’s really more innate and part of your culture. It’s like attention to detail – either you have it or you don’t. The Oracle APEX team is 100% customer focused, and lives it on a daily basis.
Easy access
The Web site, apex.oracle.com, has made a huge difference in the adoption of Oracle APEX. Today, someone can request a workspace on the evaluation Oracle APEX service at https://apex.oracle.com, and they can be up and running within minutes. This Web site (which used to be htmldb.oracle.com and, before that, marvel.oracle.com) was begun in 2002, which was before Oracle APEX (née Oracle HTML DB) was ever formally released by Oracle. There are a number of components which make up the technology stack of an Oracle APEX platform, and often times there are many hurdles to installing these components on-premises – some technical, some political. But it has proven invaluable to provide an environment where anyone on the planet can experiment, learn and explore with Oracle APEX. It’s also important that someone is able to get going in mere minutes, without requiring a credit card or purchase order, all from the comfort of their web browser.
Today, there is the Always Free Oracle Autonomous Database (oracle.com/free), and this provides an easy way to try many components of the Oracle technology stack for free – APEX, SQL Developer Web, Machine Learning, Autonomous Database, spatial, analytics, and more. And maybe apex.oracle.com will ultimately be replaced by the Always Free Oracle Cloud in the future, but there would need to be the equivalent ease of access that you get with apex.oracle.com today.
As APEX has risen in popularity, so has the interest and activity on apex.oracle.com. In 2010, there were roughly 19,000 new workspaces created on apex.oracle.com. In 2019, there were more than 113,000 new workspaces created on apex.oracle.com and we’re on pace to exceed this in 2020. In the past 7 days alone, there were 3,310 new workspaces approved on apex.oracle.com. Amazing!
You can have the greatest application development platform on the planet, but if your potential users can’t easily access it or try it, you will be limited in your reach.
Public discussion forum
Long before there was Stack Overflow (2008), there was the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) discussion forum. Today, this is called the Oracle Developer Community discussion forums and the APEX-focused discussion is accessible here. The Oracle APEX discussion forum was started in 2003 and our entire APEX product development team made a concerted effort to promptly answer any and all questions. As questions would come in, we would strive to provide meaningful responses within a couple hours. Product management and product development alike contributed to this small but growing knowledge base of APEX. As limitations were raised or bugs were reported, we acknowledged this and worked to remedy this in the next release. Additionally, customers were able to directly engage with the actual developer of a feature, instead of being filtered through multiple layers of hierarchy. This engendered good will among the enthusiasts who were experimenting with Oracle APEX, and thus, the beginning of the social connection to our community.
Once this pattern was established to provide immediate assistance to those interested in APEX, a fascinating thing happened. Over time, the participation of those providing answers on the forum shifted from almost exclusively Oracle APEX product development team members to members of the discussion forum community itself. No longer was it Oracle employees who were the experts. Members of our fledgling community had grown in their expertise and were now willing to share their knowledge and experience with so many others, and to help bring along those curious about APEX.
I believe a knowledge base is still relevant in 2020 for a developer community. There are countless ways to engage a developer community, but a knowledge base of technical questions and answers is invaluable. It enables someone to help themselves, and at their own convenience. It needs to be searchable, both from within the tool, but also from popular search engines. Although gamification of the knowledge base can’t hurt (e.g., badges, levels, awards), I do feel that the majority of super participants on the APEX discussion forum aren’t motivated by recognition, and simply do so out of the goodness of their soul.
Partner Focus
Oracle APEX is successful, in part, because of all the hard work by many of our partners from around the globe. For many years, our partners were the primary advocates of APEX, and they still remain a vital part of the APEX community. Initially, a small number of Oracle partners stumbled on APEX and decided to form consulting practices around it. These partners wrote blogs, actively participated in the discussion forums, presented at conferences, and grew into world-class experts in this domain.
Our partners are on the front lines. They understand the challenges of our customers, as well as our customers’ objections and concerns. APEX is just one tool in their technology portfolio, and these partners selected APEX for a variety of reasons, including functionality, stability and low cost. In the early days, these partners had to fight the perception of APEX being only suitable for small solutions and not strategic. When possible, we would try and intercede on behalf of the partner to simply provide assurance that APEX is a strategic tool from Oracle. You’ll never be able to dismiss all FUD or even be aware of it, but when these partners encountered spurious claims about APEX, we would rush to assist them.
We have developed personal relationships with a large number of partners, and they know they are able to immediately contact us if they are ever in need. We have assisted them with urgent customer support requests, answered technical questions, provided architecture diagrams and collateral, and jointly presented to their customers. This relationship has benefited the Oracle APEX team as well. We’ve worked with partners to develop customer success stories and quotes (where we also promote the partner), pair prospective customers with existing customers in a similar industry, and gain an understanding of trends and competition as the partners see it. They bring a unique perspective to the APEX community.
Any time I travel on business for Oracle, I always reach out to the partners nearby and ask them if there is anything I can do to help them, especially with respect to customer visits. It could be a new opportunity for the partner, or it could be an existing customer. I like to represent Oracle and show the customer that we have a close relationship with the partner, and we are committed to both the success of the partner and the customer.
Humility
We remain open to correction and advice. We will never claim to know everything. We get advice from customers and partners all the time, and we listen to them. We have a personal relationship with our customers and partners, and they freely share their challenges, suggestions, requirements, and advice with us. Our customers and partners are living the real-world use of APEX, and there is a lot we can learn from them. It is rewarding for those in the community to see us take their advice and act on it.
Years ago, I remember sitting down with Dario Bilić from partner BiLog doo. The meeting was at his request. He cited a number of challenges convincing his customers to use APEX, and one area of concern was the web presence of APEX. He opened up his computer and did an Internet search for a different Oracle tool. He demonstrated how it took him to a page on oracle.com with all of the information neatly laid out, and how it immediately answered the top questions a CIO may have. He then did the equivalent action for Oracle APEX, and the resultant information was not that lucid, condensed or available. He patiently emphasized that if you were a CIO trying to get an understanding about which tool Oracle is serious about, you would have two completely different impressions. This instruction from Dario resonated with the entire Oracle APEX team, and to this day, we are grateful that he took the time to share this valuable perspective with us.
Access to Developers
We have always promoted direct customer interaction by our product development team members, and our customers are grateful for this.
In a number of technology companies, there seems to be a rigid definition of who interacts with customers and who does not. As someone at Oracle once explained to me, “product management is the what, and product development is the how.” On the Oracle APEX team, everybody is good at everything, and we don’t always adhere to these traditional definitions of role.
The Oracle APEX product team has some of the sharpest developers on the planet. However, most of them are also world-class presenters too. You’ll find APEX team members presenting at conferences, presenting in webinars, writing blog posts, assisting with hands on labs, answering questions on the internal and external discussion forums, responding to questions on social media, and much, much more.
We strive to make the developers of APEX accessible. It has been my experience that customers and partners love to be able to interact with the actual product developers, the ones writing the code. Making the developers accessible results in relationships being formed, and it provides a great opportunity for the APEX product development team to get guidance and feedback directly from customers. It is also very rewarding for the developers themselves, as they receive great satisfaction meeting the customers who are capitalizing on their features.
Collaborative Environment
As mentioned earlier, the Web site, apex.oracle.com, has made a huge difference in the adoption of Oracle APEX by making it easy to get started. But apex.oracle.com has also been instrumental in the sharing of solutions and diagnosis of issues.
The JavaScript community has something called JSFiddle, which is “an online IDE service and online community for testing and showcasing user-created and collaborational HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets, known as ‘fiddles’.” And for all practical purposes, apex.oracle.com is the “fiddle” for the APEX community.
A large number of luminaries in the APEX community have technical demonstration apps hosted on apex.oracle.com, and they freely make these solutions available to everyone. On the technical discussion forums, when a user is seeking assistance how to do something in APEX, very often they will provide access to their workspace on apex.oracle.com where someone else in the community can review firsthand the problem they are trying to solve. Oracle Support will often ask customers to reproduce an issue on apex.oracle.com, and this gives us on the APEX product development team an easy to access environment to witness the problem firsthand and explore the issue for any immediate solutions. Everyone wins.
Make Yourself Accessible Online
The Oracle APEX team has a broad presence on social media today. It includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Telegram. We regularly promote our activities across all of these mediums
More importantly, though, these mediums are a way for customers and enthusiasts to contact us. We get bombarded with requests. But what a good problem to have! While we can’t take the place of Oracle Support or the technology discussion forums, and we will redirect there as necessary, we do try to help customers directly when practical. Customers have asked for advice online and within an hour or two, we had a short Zoom conference with them. A partner sent some broad strategy questions to our Facebook account, and we’ve taken this discussion to Zoom and email where it’s easier to correspond directly.
There’s a finite amount of time in a day with many tasks competing for our attention, but we strive to make ourselves accessible to anyone and will help as best we can.
Tag Your Community
The APEX community has a unique hash tag to correlate all activity associated with Oracle APEX. This hash tag, #orclapex, was created by the APEX community and is used consistently on social media to identify or tag a topic associated with Oracle APEX.
Hash tags are a great way for a community to stick together, to share information with one another, pose questions, and celebrate successes. You can see it for yourself on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Without a hash tag, the content associated with a community can become disjointed. People have attempted to solve this with lists, but everyone has their own list. And the list of content contributors in a community is constantly changing. With a unique hash tag, you easily enable people to locate your community content as well as enter the discussion.
Promote Customer Success
As I’ve said numerous times over the years, our reward on the Oracle APEX team is when our customers and partners are successful. Their successes should be celebrated and promoted, when possible.
Obviously, we would always love to share our customer successes on the formal Oracle Customers page, but that’s a long process and many customers have an aversion to this. But there are many other ways to assist customers too. Invite a customer or partner to participate in a Webinar. Work to get a customer a speaking slot at a conference. If they post positive news on social media, acknowledge this and help them promote their message to an even wider audience.
Your focus should be on the customer and making them the hero. You can use your platform to help broaden the reach of their message. For example, when Michelle Hardwick, who is the Director of Data Science & Analytics at Salt Lake Community College, shared the success of their new Faculty Dashboard in Oracle APEX, this was a delight to promote. She was clearly proud of their accomplishments, and we promoted this to help others become aware of their great success. It didn’t hurt that they also made Oracle APEX look spectacular.
Be Passionate
We on the Oracle APEX team believe in what we do. We use Oracle APEX for real solutions and have done so for the last 20 years. It is through this real-world usage that we have learned about APEX, understood the deficiencies, and tried to improve. We have solicited and received feedback from customers for 20 years, and have taken this counsel to improve the APEX framework.
We are authentically enthusiastic about what we do and we are excited to share this with others. Low code application development isn’t for everyone, but we have seen a large number of customer successes with APEX and we are interested in seeing others be equally successful.
Passion is one of those things that can’t be taught or learned. Either you have it or you don’t. Either you’re a believer in what you do, or you’re not. To us, this isn’t merely a job. It’s a passion, and it permeates the culture of the entire Oracle APEX Team.
You’ll see this passion on display wherever you encounter us – in person or online. And the great thing about passion is it’s infectious. Others see this and sense it, and it stirs curiosity in them. I think this has contributed to the growth and excitement in the Oracle APEX community. Those in the community know that it’s more than just a day job for us, that it’s something we’re deeply committed to, and we exude this passion every chance we get.
How can you help?
We would like your feedback, please. We’re not looking for you to heap praise on the APEX community. Rather, we’re most interested in your perspective and advice how others could go about creating a new community. If Oracle (or any other technology company) wanted to cultivate another technology community, what advice would you give them? What would they need to do to be successful and establish a growing community?
As always, you have our gratitude.