In July 2024, we held our annual FME Community User Survey. We received questions about the Ideas Board, the recent changes we’ve made to the process, and how it works. We’ll answer them here!

If you have any other questions or feedback, please submit it on our community feedback page or email community@safe.com. 

What is the Ideas Board?

The Ideas Board on the FME Community is where you can submit ideas to enhance or add new features to FME.

As a user, you can vote and comment on ideas. Safe Staff can reply to users asking for more feedback or report on the status.

As a friendly reminder, the space is not for asking questions, getting help, or suggesting ideas for safe.com website enhancements. For general website feedback, please submit it here and we’ll ensure it gets to the right person! 

What changed when you switched to the new community platform?

Earlier this year, we made updates to the Ideas process, most significantly by automating the process.

Our new community platform allows for advanced automations and integrations with FME to manage and sync ideas outside of the community. This will allow things to move more quickly and ensure you’re kept updated on the progress of an idea.

What do the statuses mean?

Ideas can have one of the following statuses assigned to them:

• New: a newly created idea. While it hasn’t yet been reviewed by the Safe moderation team, it is open for user commenting and voting.
• Open: an idea that has been reviewed by the Safe moderation team. It is open for user commenting and voting.
• Gathering Interest: ideas that have caught the attention of the product team and are being actively considered for development.
• In Development: an idea that has moved beyond the consideration phase and is currently being worked on by the development team. 
• Released: applied to ideas that have been fully developed and integrated into the product.
• Archived: used for ideas that will not be pursued. This could be because they’re not applicable, duplicated, outdated, or otherwise not in line with the product’s direction.

How does an idea move into development?

Once the Safe moderation team has approved a new idea that has been posted, users can vote and comment on the idea until it reaches a vote threshold. (Note: you can also vote or comment on an idea before it has been reviewed.)

Once the vote threshold has been reached, the Product Management team reviews the idea. They’ll keep you posted on their work through status changes on the idea, reflected in the FME Community in real-time.

Ideas that are released get updated in the FME Community and move to the Hall of Fame.

You’ll receive an email notification every time the status of the idea you submitted changes or when someone comments on the idea. 

NEW: Product Areas

Ideas can fall under one of six Product Areas: FME Form, FME Flow, FME Flow Hosted, FME AR, Integrations, and Transformers. 

Please select the best area possible when submitting an idea. For more information on Product Areas and posting an idea, please review our Idea Guidelines. 

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to start engaging with the Ideas page today!