I've had the misfortune of needing to hit the documentation for OS11 a fair bit today and wanted to share a few of my thoughts with the community, in the hopes that it will reach someone at OutSystems who can actually do something about it.

I've noticed that a vast majority of the articles I've run across today are WOEFULLY lacking in detail. Not just that, but many of them have 0% community approval ratings.

Clearly something is not working, if the entire OutSystems community thinks these articles are bad or lacking. Many of these articles are at least 6 months old, if not older.

This means you have had 6 months to fix the problems that people have reported about those articles, be they just simple down votes or comments about why the user downvoted said article.

A few examples of what I mean: OutSystems Cloud created the problem of needing to show times in user's local timezones because everything must be on UTC.... For reasons... Yeah I'm sure its easier to manage but lets not pretend you can't have regional datacenters.... That is besides the point, however, because OutSystems created the problem, and their help article on said problem is basically "You're up a creek, figure it out yourself, oh and heres an unsupported forge item."

That is not helpful. You created a problem,  you clearly know it is a problem since there is an article about it, and rather than come up with a solution for YOUR ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE, or if said solution exists, share said solution, you drop an article that took 30 seconds to write and decide "yeah we're good."

No. We're not good.

Another example are the articles about the new Charts. The charts were already overly complex, and now they just got lots of new inputs and widgets and tweaks! Great! Too bad the help docs on them are woefully inadequate. They show a few steps on how to manually make a chart.... ok... Anything that needs data, datetimes on the x axis, etc, again you're up a creek. Not only that, but the DateTime setting actually makes the display WORSE and you're forced search blindly for the correct combination of FormatDateTimes() to get it to display in a readable format.

Not only is there no documentation on putting dates in there, there is no explanation on data types AT ALL on the article specifically for chart data! It would be laughable if this problem hadn't been getting worse in my many years of using OutSystems.

OutSystems clearly has the data on their back end of what articles are bad, and which are good, and which are the very ugly. Don't continue to try and scam your community members into being your support agents and document writers. It's not working. We all have our own jobs to do and can't commit to doing yours for you full time without compensation.

I feel like I am watching the slow death of a great product, all due to a lack of support structure that continues to worsen.

Let's hope that change is coming soon, and that for once it is a good change and not another change for the worse.

Braxton