Obviously a beta program can help any business to get good feedback before going live; this is common practice as we all know... Unfortunately, I have never gone this route in the past but for my newest venture it is pretty much a must. So does anybody have advice on setting up and running a good beta program?
Depends on the nature of the program. I always launch beta's, then public beta (wwwopoly is in public beta atm, see sig) One issue i encountered is that if it's a beta, make sure anything generated with the beta (be it documents or database entries) will be compatible with the final. I had to wipe all the databases when i went to public beta because there had been so much work done, so a few of the testers were a bit frustrated that they'd lost their pages in the game lol.