Minutes from the Session:
- Sean works for the Usability, Support and Evaluation Lab at UMichigan, a group which is separate and distinct from Sakai and Sakai developers.
- May or may not make winter term jump to Sakai 2.1 from 2.0. Administrative and project uses of CTools are biggest area of growth.
- Sakai lacks robust administrator tools that can give detailed usage information about sites. Michigan uses NetTracker to parse log files to garner this data.
- Support business is greatest in email, then phone, and walk-ins as a distant last. Mondays and Tuesdays are days of highest use. 90 fte hours for support per week.
- 30 fte hours of QC per week as well. QC may lie outside support per se, but it is critical to success of local deployments. Sean encourages adopters to have local QC. QC by risk: tools that have changed recently and high usage tools. Always QC before you push a new release. Also, try to get on the Sakai QC team to get a better handle on issues that can impact you locally.
- Sean's group has connections/staff with 18 colleges and schools at Michigan to provide more local and context-specific support.
- Training is entirely intructor-focused. Students can figure it out on their own or with the help of other students. Training is also best provided to groups in order to scale, with discipline or department level groupings common. 2 hour sessions that are interactive and hands-on. Training, new software releases, and documentation must be bundled.
- Documentation is critical. People do read it. Localize it carefully. A manual, with use cases and functionality spelled out tool by tool, can help, as can Flash or other visual walkthroughs.
- Gather performance metrics for your support activities and make sure they get to management. Sean's team uses the Footprints trouble ticket tracking system. Touches per ticket is a valuable metric. Set service level goals and let clients know what they are. Automated responses to emails are useful.
- Voices of customers, when sent to support staff and developers, can personalize issues and crystalize support for changes in software or support processes.
- Sean expects that Resources tool in 2.1 (it's very different than that in 2.0) will cause trouble with users. He expects chat and discussion issues to rise as well as usage of these tools climbs.