It was great to hear during the conference that the "Experience" site is being used as a key tool to communicate between the user community and Fellowship Tech. I had used the site originally when it first came out, but became "disenchanted" about it when I did not get timely feedback on some of my posts from a Fellowship Tech associate. Needless to say, I stopped using the site. So it was good to hear the site is being used so much by Fellowship Tech. And I will be using it once again more myself.
The first suggestion I have is related to the reporting bugs/errors. I read a post from Teresa Bice (dated 11-05-2007, 8:18 PM) where she was asking for a list of known bugs. It was basically closed with the comment, "it is too difficult to do". I agree with Fellowship Tech that this would be difficult because it would be a long, long list that would involve lots of issues many of which do not affect the normal user. In my opinion a complete list of every single known error would cause more confusion than it would help. But I have a related but slightly different suggestion.
"Experience" has a "forums" menu tab to post anything related to a specific subject. I notice that posts range from "how do I do this or that" to "ideas". (Yes, ideas should all be in the "ideas" section, but I do find them in the "forums" also.) I really like the "ideas" tab because it gives us the ability to separately review suggestions without seeing all those other posts. I think something needs to be done to also separate "bug/error reporting".
What I would like to suggest is that you either:
a) add a "Bug/Error Report" menu tab so that we can easily go into the three different areas (forums, ideas, bug/errors)
b) add a special "Bug/Error" tag that is VERY obvious to anyone that they should select this if what they are reporting is something related to a "bug/error" (in addition to checking the "check-in" tag or whatever their post is related to).
c) That you move/link any post related to a bug/error report to some special area that we can review (or make it easily searchable"
d) That you create a "reported" list of bug/errors, that we can review and comment and maybe even vote on.
You may ask why, when we can open support tickets? Well there have been times I have discovered an error and posted it to support, and then been told it is really an idea and it needs to be posted to the ideas section of the "experience" site. Bugs/Errors that have been reported that are considered not "critical" in nature (or "cosmetic" in nature) that do not need to be fixed immediately sometimes are considered "ideas". But no matter the severity of the issue, I think the user community needs to know about them and whether they have been fixed or in the process of being fixed. Having some place to review what has been reported would be helpful.
Also it would be to save time. During the conference I talked to a number of Fellowship Tech associates about bugs and errors that I knew of. I sometimes got answers like "we know about that one" or "we did not know about that one". Once I returned from the conference, I checked online to see if I could find anything about those bugs/errors and only found a few postings related to a couple of the bugs/errors I personally discussed with people during the conference. If I had not already knows that some of the bug/problems on my list were already known by Fellowship Tech and in many cases the fix was in a release soon to be released, I would be wasting my time documenting and reporting the error - be it in a support ticket or a forum/idea.
What I would like to see is an easy and quick way to review what bugs/errors that have been reported so that it saves everyone from wasting time reporting errors/bugs that you already know about. And since the "user community" cannot see bugs/errors reported though support tickets, there should be some process on the Fellowship Tech side to take a true bug/error reported to the support ticket side and list it on the "experience" side so we all can see it.
Oh and it should go without saying that the list/forum/whatever should be moderated in some way. Non-detailed posts like "I got a blue screen when running check-in" should not be included in this bug/error reporting list/area I am recommending.
And then finally, once this list is established in some way or another, then there could be comments by the community or Fellowship Tech as to how to "work around" the issue.
John Schneider
Forest Hill Church