My thoughts on Nathan’s posting/rant from today
Tags :Sametime Hannover policies
You can find the full posting right here. I read it through twice and we talked a few on IM. I promised I would post some of my own thoughts on the matter. I saw a couple other bloggers chime in on the comments area of the posting.
I am starting from inside his rant area Static interfaces are yesterday's news. I want the ability to turn EVERYTHING on and off. I want the ability to alter every single menu item on the screen. I want control of everything in the bookmark bar. I want to be able to set mail preferences that completely hide entire functionality sets
I know Lotus is working hard to control more area via policies, but take a step back and look. Policies were a major change for Domino 6, undoing years or local client ini settings and management. Functionality and features are way beyond what policies are currently. DCC was introduced in R5 behind the scenes for simple location document changes. I see policies being stronger towards Hannover and Domino 8. Saying that, there are areas in policy control Lotus should have entered at the same time features get rolled out. But look at DCC and Sametime. The ability to natively (without coding a subform on a policy) change and set the home Sametime server, did not appear until 6.5.4. Yet, integration took place in 6.5.
Now Nathan goes on to another point that makes perfect sense: GUI design 101 says that users get confused when presented with more than 7 options in a list. The context (right-click) menu in my Notes inbox has 27 choices! TWENTY SEVEN!!!! It fills the screen in 800x600 resolution! The inbox has 9 action buttons across the top and 18 items in the Actions menu! How do you digest that? I've been writing software for this platform for almost 15 years, and I get lost in my own email!
Lotus jumped right into more menu items in 7 with further right-click menu options for Sametime. You can find almost everything in an Action menu, button, right-click or Smarticon. There are menu items that Mary Beth is brining up (like Quote Selection) that I had forgotten about entirely! So cleaning up the menu choices would be a nice thing. Mainly if it could be controlled via policies.
However, to keep this short. The type of granularity needed would be hard to manage. Most enterprises do not want to entertain explicit policies just to have some menu item function. So finding the balance on what the user needs/wants/finds are all different. They need reply and with history and without attachment. Should that be admin decided? I say no. Some say yes to reduce message sizes. But with the new better mail threading and showing of threads in a message, keeping history is a key thing.
So where does that leave us? I fully believe in shrinking many menu items. I fully believe that Mary Beth is attempting that in some of the questions she is asking. I fully believe that we won't get a lite or stripped client to keep up with functionality.
Official statements on Sametime 7.5 controls and policies are needed as well as any greater policy control in Hannover. My bet is that it is not finalized, so they won't make statements since something might not make it.
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On Thursday, April 20th, 2006 by Chris Miller
