Suggestion: build a forums knowledgebase

[TCWardrobe]

Hi folks,

I think my question is not right here, but as there is no good forum for this kind of question either...
Anyhow, I had several issues with scalix up to now which were rather easily solved but to find the solution was kind of hard. Sometimes it took hours to find the solution buried in the forums, and sometimes it was just coincidence that I found what I was looking for. A few minutes before I decided to make this suggestion I had such a problem once again. I just found the solution because someone posted something like "Oh, btw. if you have this problem too, have a look here <url> at the very bottom, it solved my problem"... doh! And as a side note, phpBB and the search function do suck!

So, how about this: If someone finds a solution for a specific problem, write it down in the wiki. There it should be a absolute MUST to be specific, maybe there should be categories like

Code: Select all

- Outlook addressbook
   - SYSTEM addressbook
      - issue foo
      - issue bar
      - batz issue
   - public addressbook
      - [...]
   - private addressbook
      - [...]

- SAC
   - limitations
      - issue blubb
      - issue foobar

- webmail
   - [...]

- rights and permissions
   - Outlook public folders
      - [...]
   - delegation
      - [...]


In best cases scalix staff should read those articles, comment them, prove them. Of cource the matching threads should be noted there, as the exact version numbers of the product, and links to bugreports of the issues if applicable. a "flat" hierarchy like the bugzilla or the forums are more than suboptimal for such a BIG thing like Scalix!
I was about writing such a thing for just us, but why not for all people? I don't expect it to happen immediately but I want comments on this first.

greets
Michael

[florian]

Hi Michael,

any suggestion in such a space is a good suggestion. However, I personally don't believe that a hierarchical solution like yours works to well.

This reminds me quite a bit of my mailbox, in which a lot of information is buried. I'm a real bad corporate citizen that way (and have been with the company for long enough that I have enough admin access and authority to keep it that way... ), my mailbox is approaching 5 GB and growing.

Now, for mailboxes there are two schools of thought, one employs sorting stuff in folders, tagging, etc, the other one uses search. I'm certainly a big fan of the latter, because my brain doesn't think in a single path to a piece of information, i.e. sometimes I search for a message by sender, while sometimes I'm looking for the same thing by content, subject or time.

Therefore, I'm a "search" person and I use various search tools (first and foremost, Apple's Spotlight, right on my client) and it works for me.

Now, on the forum, I do agree that phpBB sucks completely with it's built-in search; this is terrible and it doesn't help me with anything.

However, as so often when it comes to search problems, google is your friend... just go to your google search bar (or google.com) and type

"site:scalix.com outlook address book" (this example works well)

With this, I mostly find what I'm looking for and for me it's both a nice and a workable solution....

What do you think?

Florian.

[TCWardrobe]

Hi Florian,

I think a users mailbox does not fit in this example for simple reasons. First, a user filters, manages, sorts his mail his way for him and of course he can filter, manage, sort for names, topics, customers, projects, whatever... but the thing I thought of is managed just object oriented. Like "weird problem with my Outlook connector, let's have a look there" even if the solution is somewhere else, like on the server side. There it does not matter from whom this solution is and of course there is only one project. And of course it is managed not for just him but for all, so it must be managed in a understandable way for all.

But after all I will try to remember the google hint, thanks for this valuable hint

greets
Michael

[jaime.pinto]

This is a really good point. No question I like the thread/post structure provided by phpBB, but on the other hand I've been disappointed with their search engine for as long as I can remember, and the most current version isn't any better.
So here is the suggestion/request to scalix: Please edit the phpBB toolbar and add a button/link to the google engine directly from here