To keep this Sunday friendly, this will be my last off topic response: I asked Barbara, not ‘you guys’. @lxonline edited my original post to remove the ‘@barbara’ . Surely she knows what I was referring to. 
If you have nothing to add to the subject of the topic itself @M_Lange , would it be too much to ask you just don’t? Keep in mind I am at least as big a fanboy of Victron as yourself but that doesn’t mean I have to keep shut every time you comment on every perceived misunderstanding of what I am talking about. “Dat is niet erg sfeerverhogend”
I’m not against the new product info in VRM. In fact. I actually like it. Yes. Not everyone can / will get notified about new firmware et all. Like now we don’t need a fuse anymore for the VM 3P75CT. Yeah yeah. I also did get the email, but end-users usually won’t get it. So I am fine with them getting into the loop. I just tell people that when they update firmware themselves, that they are responsible for all issues that may arise.
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And that is fine for you. But I am against Victron marketing messages being pushed towards our customers on the VRM monitoring portal. So I request an opt out or even better an option to put our own customer specific system instructions and manuals in that digital messaging real estate location. The reasoning is that it is us/me that is going to get the support call when anything is not working as expected.
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I personally haven’t seen any real marketing there. Mostly firmware release info. And ok so you want an opt-out. Others may perhaps argue that opt-in is better. I get that. But would that also mean that you would be denying your customers to opt-in or turning the opt-out back off?
So far I’ve only had hardware issues, battery problems and one occasion where a firmware update wrecked havoc. Next to Victron installers reluctant to update hardware.
I’d be extremely happy if my customers would request to take over the administration role over their system.
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Haha. I no longer support DESS setups, because I am not happy with it, and for the rest…my clock will be running. No free loading.
I envy you, my core business is marine propulsion though, it is a tough market corner to find your bearings in.
I did see that starting to appear even in the GX menus. So it seems to be working into the systen there a bit.
I think you misunderstand me here a bit. I mean our own customer specific system level instructions and manuals. I dearly hope never needing to have my customers having to access GX (settings) menus.
You don’t have much trust in your customers?
As the one who pays for the system the customer should always have full access to the system.
At least that’s my opinion
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Cut it out will you, please?
No i didn’t. I just saw that there is an uptake on the idea.of manual links integration.
I like the idea of customer specific uploads. Obviously is a needed integration as Victron systems are pretty much all custom systems. And more so if you have extra integrations.
But can also see how that would load up servers as well database issues.
Even the ability to dropbox (or other file storage) link your tailored documents in the vrm customer page would be useful.
I do ise the notes alot. And the photos. Have included schematics there.
Great! Thanks for noticing the portal update, because I didn’t notice it. I use a direct link for direct results. But now I will change the link so I can see the news, or as you interpret it, advertisements. Nice update.
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We could have our cake and you could eat it too, if there were to be an option to opt out of Victron’s communications (or place our own) on the VRM front/home page. That location is the most readily accessable (thus valuable) piece of digital real estate on the VRM portal.
I don’t like cake, the internet is full of cookies I don’t like either;)
But I get your point. Is it really that important to opt out, only to suggest in the same sentence that that prime location could serve your own content? And then your customer base could also opt out of your content? I’ll have to think this over…
I didn’t start out with the idea to add my own content, that only came up after reading up on previous topics around the VRM homepage. Anyway, as many captains as many opinions, that’s ok. The reason for posting originates from a discomfort around the general direction Victron seems to be moving towards further gamification and commercialisation of the VRM portal.
Whereas my interest in Victron as a platform is mostly technical as an installer of (highly) modified marine systems, with most if not all required interactions with the system automated and hidden from the actual ‘users’: the skippers employed to operate the vessels. And the owners not all to interested in technicalities either, getting them to adapt to self management using VRM is challenging enough as it is.
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Hey all!
I’ll try and take away some of the concerns mentioned in this thread.
I indeed asked for input on the new homepage, and almost everyone that responded mentioned they would like to see the Victron Professional news items there, so they don’t have to log in to Professional on top of VRM. I understand that it feels frustrated if you give input, and in the end feel like we just disregarded that feedback entirely.
While this homepage was in BETA, we saw that most BETA users enabled all sections. For sake of simplicity (Victron has a lot of configurable parts, so let’s keep the software straightforward where possible), we decided to remove the customization option for the homepage.
This page is only the homepage for users with over 10 installations. So that’s installers, not end customers of installers. For most of them, Victron Professional news is indeed not relevant. I do think that for installers, the news items are very relevant, to stay up to date with the latest upgrades and also learn more about Victron software.
Hope this clears up some of the discussions here.
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So if I understand correctly, the option to opt out already exists? Then please enable that option. I think it is entirely misplaced to decide this to be mandatory for everyone based on a single call for comments with undisclosed results and a very short beta test that most are not even aware of existing and those that are by nature of the beta test program, already very biased to agree with and defend Victron’s viewpoints, thus hardly representative for the wider audience.
As a sidenote, that comment form itself was quite biased by itself already, there were no options available to keep VRM as is or revert recent changes. It is discouraging to even participate in polls and betas when they come across as a means to manufacture consent towards a preferred outcome.
At risk of repeating myself, I am not advocating against the feature, I am advocating for choice.
Maybe it can be configured in a way, that ONLY the Installer/Admin can see it and NOT the irdinary User of the system.
If there is only one Installer/Admin/User it should be shown too.
I think, this option should satisfy nearky everyone.
Have a nice day