Welcome to tankete.com Sign in | Join | Help

José Lema

Inside the Community Server development team

Shared Posts


Badges



  • www.flickr.com
    This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from tankete. Make your own badge here.
Poor Planning...Frustrated Customers

What's wrong with this picture? And before you make any disparaging comments about the Raiders, or this particular fan, it has nothing to do with either.

Any ideas? Well, without the proper back story it's probably too subtle. Let me explain.

The problem is that whenever the stadium was built, noone thought about how big the parking lot should be. And, worse than that, nobody thought about how many overflow lots would be needed for a sellout crowd (the last one closed with the car immediately in front of us...no joke). You would think that this isn't rocket science, but somehow, arriving at the stadium entrance more than *an hour in advance* landed us on a street far far away...*after* the kickoff. So if you look in the background you just may notice the stadium. And if you were with us, you too would have arrived at your seats in the 2nd quarter with about 6 minutes remaining in the first half! Absolutely Unbelieveable!!!

Similarly, I received my copy of Halo 3 Limited Edition in the mail last week. And as many have described, mine too was both scratched and scuffed. In fact, it appears that it may have led to the complete blow up of my XBOX 360. Again, it seems like a bit better planning could have saved the company significant headaches and frustrated customers. Halo 3 isn't the first game to be shipped in the mail, and it's absolutely unbelieveable that this could have happened.

Now I'm not sure that the Raiders organization cares that much...or even feels the pain it caused me, but I wouldn't want to be the guy responsible for the Halo 3 LE packaging!

So here's the important question, what areas of Community Server have caused you serious frustration due to our poor planning? What about other software?

Share this post: StumbleUpon | email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!
Posted: Monday, October 01, 2007 9:25 PM by Jose

Comments

Colin Bowern said:

I would vote for modularity and consistency.  I'm playing with Telerik's Sitefinity and in the 3.0 release (have the 3.1 beta, but no time to unpack it as of yet) and I can tell that it's a clean start as far as a CMS in concerned.  If Community Server could really clean up it's base to provide both a great out-of-the-box experience, but a smooth, modular development experience that would be great.  Examples include consistently implementing concepts across the different functional areas (e.g. I pointed out how the RSS feeds were not the same in implementation across the 2007 release on a few posts).  Being able to easily turn off and uncouple the modules that weren't being used.  I can't recall but I know there are some resource dependencies between modules (something tells me it was the file module that took a dependency on the forum module).  If I had to give a good evolutionary kick at it I would step back, refactor what you have into pluggable cross-module services (e.g. security, logging and tracing, globalization) and then define interfaces to which the modules plug into.  From there I would work with the module owners to expose concepts in a similar manner.  All of this, of course, comes from the experience of growing a package.  I don't think anyone could have anticipated some of the directional growth that went on.  I am suggesting it more so that there could be a moment to pause before we head down the path of complete entrenchment and the resulting inability to make these larger platform refactoring choices.  DNN was a great example where in the five minutes I played with it I was turned off by the heaviness of the platform.  Then there's SharePoint.  I probably shouldn't say much more as that is a beast onto itself that really needs a good clean up.

# October 2, 2007 1:01 AM

John said:

For me CommunityServer the things that irk me are:

1) Inconsisten casing with file names/ folders etc etc. It leads to the perception that this is still a product that was a result of nGallery, .Text and the Forums.

2) Consistently changing road plans. Initially I signed on for Community Server because there was clear communication that a CMS would be built in for a future version. Now it appears that this will be another product sold by CommunityServer for even more money. It leaves for a foul taste.

# October 2, 2007 1:06 AM

Jose said:

Colin - Great feedback! I think we would agree with you that it is indeed a goal of ours to make it more modular. In fact, hopefully you would agree that we've done a better job with consistency with the work we have done with Chameleon, and our new not-yet-released REST API.

That said, there is much more we can do. The difficult part is to refactor while adding to the product. Some customers couldn't care a less about the internals...just make it work...and I need X, Y, and Z yesterday. While others are focused on using the platform at a much lower level of detail. I agree with you that we have not yet found the right balance, but I *think* we are headed in the right direction. It is just difficult when the product is already so big.

BTW, I hope that doesn't sound like an excuse...just the reality of where we're at.

# October 2, 2007 1:17 AM

Jose said:

John - We definitely want/need to improve our internal codebase, specifically as related to structure and consistency. However, going forward, I believe we will be strongly encouraging our new REST API (and Client Library wrapper) as *the* point of integration. We have already started making sure that since it'll be a public API, that we maintain a level of consistency across all the applications. And we plan to pay close attention to versioning issues, since it'll be more permanent than our internal code.

I certainly hear your frustration with regards to our changing road map. It's a difficult situation for us, since our customers' needs are what ultimately drive the direction of the product. But I also understand that some folks purchase the product for what it will be, not necessarily what it is. And while that's a somewhat risky strategy, I know it's not rare.

Please know that your concerns, specifically related to adding CMS capabilities to CS is not falling on deaf ears. Our goal is still to delight our customers by exceeding their expectations. I'll make sure we chat more about this issue internally.

Thanks again John...

# October 2, 2007 1:33 AM

Ranko said:

In CS I am struggling with setting up a multi language site (like asp.net managed to do). With all the components in there I really do not understand why the key feature - language switcher is used for registered members, when it woud be more usefull to allow unregistered user to switch their language.

Just look at the tools: language folder, set up blog's default language (auto showing of prefered language content anyone?), anonymous settings for default value.

# October 2, 2007 3:12 AM

Jose said:

Ranko - Since all anonymous access is shared by a single account, we don't currently support profile settings for unregistered users. I guess something could be done with cookies...

# October 3, 2007 1:36 PM

Leo said:

A plugin like this would rock > http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html

# October 4, 2007 5:28 PM
New Comments to this post are disabled