Portfolio 6

I think it would be a good idea to push users towards a discussion forum when they need help (they would go first to a our pre-determined help tutorials, but there would be a really obvious link to the discussion forum)... I was inspired by Google's model when trying out Google Calendar today. They link first to a normal help section, then there is a link with the heading "Learn from other Calendar Users" to a discussion forum.

Not only would user help each other with figuring things out, but we could capture that information to enhance usability and help decide which enhancements are most desired.

Posted by Nicole Tollefson at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Right now portfolio 5 is only displaying HTML for presentations. The thought of rendering to PDF or other format is a possibility if our presentation source is an XML document translated via XSLT. We use XSLT to do transformations in Portfolio 5, but we only translate to HTML.

Posted by Thomas Enebo at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I cannot remember how we were going to handle versioning of wizards and presentations. I suspect new users will only see the latest versions. Older users may see both if they have ever entered/presented with an older version. What is the proper way to deal with versioning of things?

Migration of data between versions of wizards is very difficult in Portfolio 5 and I am not sure we have ever done it. I want to make sure we have a decent strategy for dealing with version in Portfolio 6.

Posted by Thomas Enebo at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If a user needs to add a list of research projects, then they may want to display them in chronological order. Perhaps, they want to order them in order of relevance. I think for sure, people will want to pick order to display in a presentation. I also suspect in a worksheet environment (aka wizard) they may want to organize there information in a particular order.

The above paragraph also implied that ordering by some simple sort criteria may also be useful. Like date sort on entries with dates or alphabetical sort on partciular fields. It would be easy to leave out any packaged sorts in lieue of manually being move things into the order you want.

Posted by Thomas Enebo at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Students' Facebook faces adult invasion - article on how employers have started to look prospective employees up on Facebook.

Did you express yourself? Now protect yourself - same author's advice on checking out and protecting your online reputation. I like the idea of giving students practical advice like this. Maybe we could expand the idea and make an online article that could rotate through feature articles on our main P6 public page.

Posted by Nicole Tollefson at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)