[UK] Welcome to Ask Avnet!

Hello, element14 community members! Today we are very excited to announce a new feature on the element14 Community site - Ask Avent!

What is Ask Avnet?

Excellent question! Ask Avnet is new feature that allows you to "access the diverse engineering knowledge base across Avnet, Hackster.io and element14". It's a tool to help you find products, product information, projects for those products, and more, and not just on element14. It's connected across the entire Avent ecosystem, making it easier to find stuff not only here, but on Hackster.io and Avnet.com as well. You can learn more about it, here.

How can I use it?

Currently, we've enabled it for all of our community members in the UK. If you're located in the UK, you should now see a small speech bubble in the lower right corner of your page. By clicking on it, you should be prompted with a quick tutorial on how to use the tool, as well as see some basic navigational tools. (Hint: Hit the + sign for more shortcuts!)

Why only the UK?

We're limiting the initial audience primarily for implementation and testing purposes. While we've been running Ask Avent on our staging environment for some time, there's always a chance for something to go horribly, horribly awry. ... ... Also, it gives us the chance to gather some initial feedback from our members, and do some iterative changes before launching it globally.

What if I really want to try it out?

You are always welcome to swap your location to the UK via your User Preferences under your profile. We're limiting it based on the country you have selected, meaning if you swap it to the UK you should now have access. And of course, our plan is to eventually launch this feature globally.

How do I submit a bug report, feedback, suggestions for improvement, etc.?

You are welcome to share any feedback or bug reports you have right there, in this very blog post. You can also send it directly to the team over at Avnet working on the project by sending an email to: AskAvnet@avnet.com. Please provide as much detail as possible, especially with bug reports. This includes screen shots, browser information, etc.

When can we expect the feature to launch globally?

TBD. We'll have more information once the Ask Avnet has been successfully launched in the UK, and we've had some time to gather the aforementioned feedback and squash any bugs.

Thank you for your time, and we look forward to your feedback!