Hi guys, maybe it's time to look at the real issues that this thread started off of? The major one being that users request a mail component on a daily basis.
Which *happens* because they are individual users who don't read the
mailing list for 2 years already. They express their individual request.
But which *results* in a posting like that coming in every day. Boring.
We (the regular readers of this list) are over explaining again and
again that there is work underway to integrate Mozilla emailing and
calendaring solutions with OpenOffice.org. For us it's not an individual
request but an endless boring story of pointless postings.
So, the real issue here is that users post these requests on this list.
Which should give us a hint that something is wrong with the way we
channel the communication attempts of our users. How can it be they find
this mailinglist quicker than they find information about what OOo has
to say in regards to emailing?
How come they request the same feature here one by one instead of voting
for the according bug in the issuetracker?
Apart from some of those finding their origin in the special
demographics of our userbase ("Dear sir/madam, i'm contacting your
company..." ;-) ), i think it is the same old "kill all in one"
collabnet approach of our website that is the trouble.
Any naive user does not have any chance to find the notion of "OOo is
working on integrating Thunderbird/Lightning as an emailing/calendaring
solution." As a matter of fact, it takes a lot of effort to get to any
kind of information regarding OOo and email from the main web page.
Furthermore, come to the OOo website as a naive user and try to report a
bug or a feature request. Where do you click...on "Support"? Ahh...a
nice long overwhelming list of documentation resources, most of them
leading to more nice long lists of links to resources. So let's try
"Contributing". Hmm...quality assurance might be my closest
bet...click...ohh...click...ohh...i'm lost.
Even the FAQ (which in itself is hard to find) is a nightmare.
OOo users simply have nowhere to go. The OOo web site is made for
contributers and the press, but not for users. I think the solution
would be to make www.openoffice.org user oriented, move collaboration
stuff to collab.openoffice.org and press information to
press.openoffice.org...marketing has taken the right step forward here
with why.openoffice.org. Or otherwise, create users.openoffice.org and
put a big, blatant, eye-hurting link on the OOo main site.
André.
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