Dimensions is a global research platform that we are continuously improving for the benefit of the community. A unique feature of our product development program is that we involve domain experts from the community to guide and inform our development plans and roadmaps, set against a backdrop of real industry trends and a determination to do things differently and better.
With these considerations in mind, in January 2017, a full year before the official product launch, we set up a development partner program that saw us spend more than 100 hours in sessions with over 140 domain experts from universities, funders and government organizations. We formed solid relationships with these highly respected experts, showed them wireframes, working prototypes, and demos; and learned about their use cases and the challenges they faced in their everyday working lives dealing with research information. We also encountered technical specialists who helped us assess the strength of our data coverage and the ability of our API and web application to deliver against very specific use cases within their organizations.
As we brought Dimensions to market and started to gain full institutional subscribers, we felt it was a natural transition to evolve from a development partner program to a full product user group. So in October 2018, we informed our development partners of this natural transition and to our delight, most of them decided to continue on the journey with us and joined our new Product User Group. The first session for which will take place this month on February 14th.
In this first session, we will have a very interesting use case presentation from Dr Tim Cain, from the Ohio Innovation Exchange, on how the 6 Ohio Universities are using Dimensions in combination with Symplectic Elements, local institutional systems and a Department of Higher Education information system to provide a platform that encourages engagement and collaboration between higher education and industry. The portal can be visited here.
We will also be providing a preview of the 2019 development roadmaps for both the Dimensions web apps and APIs and inviting user group members to give their feedback.
If you’d like to express your interest in joining our institutional focused user group, drop me an e-mail and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.