Hello All, For the last two years I have been, periodically, posting to this mailing list. I won't recount my first message to the list. But I was thinking about one of the early lines of comment I had to make - it had to do with 'Who is the real user of a desktop database application, such as Base?'. I don't think I need to recount those earlier conversations on that point either. The answer is of course that there isn't a single user profile.
Having a discussion about the aspects of some piece of software being developed was not a new experience for me, although in this type of open community setting it has been. During this same period, however, there was a totally new experience. First line customer support - I can't say why it happened but I kind of elected myself to the role at the OOoForum site. A week or so ago I past a small milestone in that role - 2000 ( 2,128 as of today) postings to the board. It has been an interesting experience. I did a quick search and found that I had participated in 1,195 separate message threads - the overwhelming majority dealing with Base. Almost always responding to a question of 'how do I' or 'why did it'. Today I read a blog entry "The quality of OpenOffice.org is not a miracle", by Thorsten Ziehm on GullFOSS. Just prior to reading that Blog I had responded to a message on the Forum with the subject line: "Is there some way to encourage the OOo team to improve Base?<http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=57452>". Now before anyone think this message is about disagreeing with Mr. Ziem, it is not. In fact my experience has been that this users comments have become the exception that proves the rule. At the moment I can only offer anecdotal evidence, my recollection, but there has been a sea change in the types of messages coming into the Base section at forum from the 'Why did it do that to me' to 'How do I'. That will wait for another post here however, as I am in the early stages of generating some actual metrics on the types of questions that have been asked over this period, and will hold off till I finish that work. I couldn't get a dump of the database, but I do have a screen scrape of the total postings :>) [ not generated by me - thanks Terry ] But I will wager dimes to dollars that I know the number one How to question - 'How to filter a forms records based on the users selection in a drop down list box?'. There is one metric that I do have and is the reason for this particular email. July of 2005 there was a long thread on the board in which I put together a small database in response to a users question regarding many to many relationships and how to work with them using Base forms. ( as I reacall using a pre-2.0 version of Base ) The database was started by calling a routine in a Basic library that displayed a dialog box, then programmatically displays two forms. ( The Base file is never opened on the desktop ) The forms can each open the other, and then update the caller upon closing. It is for tracking Projects and Contacts. The forms are not what I would call complicated, but neither could be created with the wizards supplied with Base as they are 3 and 5 level deep sub forms. The forms rely on basic scripts to do most of their data manipulation. When putting it together my target user was not the end user of the application, but the developer of the application. When done the database, basic library and a small readme file were zipped up and placed on my ftp server with a link back to the message for those that wanted to get it. October 2005 I created a thread called 'Begginers - Example Database - Base Tutorial'. This is just a running commentary of the steps to creating a very simple, single form database based on the employees table structure supplied with Base. Again the database has been hosted on my ftp server for download ever since. In this case my target was a personal Base user, creating their own database for their own use. I assumed they would have little or no experience using any database application before. In the case of the beginners database the thread has ever since been marked as a sticky and sits as the very first entry on the Base list. The ProjectContacts database thread was not so marked and is now some thousands of threads down the list. There are also perhaps another dozen small databases available for download either on my server or others now, for use as examples of one thing or another. Here is the interesting thing to me. I was looking at the sites usage statistics. I was not surprised to see the employees.odb file near the top of files hit on the OpenOffice section of the server. I was surprised to see that even today the ProjectsContacts.zip file is consistently, month in, month out, either slightly ahead of the beginners database in downloads or just behind. In the last 6 months - employees.odb 2918 downloads, ProjectsContacts.zip 2875. So - three things seem clear to me. First - I really need to go back and clean up that ProjectsContacts database, as the scripts are a terrible, I looked at them again and cringed. Second - Lack of decent Base documentation and some better example databases is a real problem. Third - Releasing a real report writer without any end user documentation is going to exacerbate the second point. Thanks for reading along, I'll put up stats on common user questions as soon as I can get this tangled mess of data from screen scrape sorted out, sliced and diced. Drew ps. A fourth thing seems clear - The developers really have their hands full trying to meet the needs of two widely different user communities.
