[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Messages notification

[David Farning]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Martin Abente
> <martin.abente.lahaye at gmail.com> wrote:
>> * Why the user should start an activity to know what is happening?
>
> Why/when does the user want to know "what's happening"? Users are busy
> doing something interesting...
>
> We should interrupt/hassle the user never. Or extremely seldom.
>
MartinL

I think this is one of the times where we need to agree to disagree.
There is a very good chance that this patch set will never make it
into Sugar.Main. What you are saying is 100% true from an end users
point of view.

This patch has a place in Dextrose.  Dextrose is looking at the
question, "How can we provide support staff the necessary information
to effectively fix and/or report problems to a higher level of service
and support?"

A pretty typical 'support' staff consists of:

Users - Students who fix their own problems.

Teachers - Usually have very limited time and technical training - In
general, teachers prefer to 'work around' known bug rather than figure
out how to report them.

Teachers trainers - It is quite common for deployments to have teacher
trainers to improve teaching efficacy.  In general, teacher trainers
are also time constrained because they focus on the educational,
rather than technical, implementation issues.

Level I Service and Support - It is becoming common for established
deployments to outsource level I service and Support to local
businesses.  This group is also constrained.  They often work
remotely.  There is travel time required to get to a school or class
room.  Their required skill sets are often very broad; hardware,
software, networking.

And so it goes until an issue is fixed or is escalated until it
reaches the level of someone on sugar-devel.  Everyone on sugar-devel
is time constrained.  They are pull in a hundred direction at any
given time.

This patch will introduce a cost of user disruption, but hopefully
will provide the benefit of increased efficacy of existing service and
support channels.  This place has a place.... but that place is
probably not sugar.main.

david