Hey @Sam_S, I hear you. Our team also read and talked about your feedback in our team meeting today. We completely understand it's super frustrating to expect to get a resolution, and then not have everything addressed by the end of Office Hours, especially after waiting for others to discuss their building questions.
We’ve offered Office Hours for several years now, with the aim of learning about and discussing Retool in a group. It began as an organic way to hop on and chat to get to know other people who are building and learning on Retool. It remains a space where sometimes users offer solutions to each other and work collaboratively to learn, in addition to Retool team members providing guidance and tips and tricks. More recently, as our user base and Office Hours attendees have grown, it's become even tougher to ensure everyone has a chance to get to all of their questions. Which leads us to:
Your feedback is really timely, because this week we've been discussing our plan to start sharing a survey with Office Hours participants to take in feedback as we plan improvements to our Office Hours in future months and 2025. We may break up office hours into different focuses, or separate out times for new users specifically, or something else based on users' perspectives.
Most similar companies don't offer live support unless a customer has an Enterprise plan. Office Hours has been a way for us to provide some availability for any and all plan levels, and we'd like to keep finding a way for this channel to work for folks and serve a useful purpose. That said, you've surfaced really valid points around why this can be tough to scale up to more and more users.
One other initiative that should improve the experience of getting to a resolution in the community is to more regularly re-surface unresolved topics in our product categories to the front page of community.retool.com, so that others in the community can see the thread is still open and chime in. We tested this in August and plan to implement it system-wide this quarter, which should boost visibility and engagement on open topics.
For your specific questions, I know we were able to get past one of the blockers but not the other…
I also invite others who may be MongoDB experts here in the community to chime in in parallel if you have suggestions.