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Disconnected rants

Thanks for the help

By dlambert ⋅ July 22, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
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If you’re hypothetically considering changing the interface of your application so completely that users can’t find the stuff they need in the places where they’re used to finding it (Office, I’m looking at you…), you might be expected to have your users need to use “help” a bit more than normal.

And if you expect your users to need to use your help system, and if you choose to make that help system an internet experience, and if that internet experience is going to use a browser that’s had so many restrictions placed upon it in the name of security that you can’t sneeze without seeing some sort of exception (IE, I’m looking at you….), you should probably consider the likelihood that your users (already frustrated because they can no longer accomplish something that they used to be able to accomplish on their own) are going to encounter a help system that looks something like this:

Thanks a lot, Microsoft.

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  • gm

    Why are you running office from a server O/S? Or was this on a client O/S? If so that sucks. If not, then don;t use a server O/S for doing client stuff… Seems simple to me. The help web site for enhanced security says this:

    “As a best security practice, a server administrator should not browse Internet Web sites from the server. The administrator should only browse the Internet from a limited user account on a client work station to reduce the possibility of an attack on the server by a malicious Web site.”

    Seems reasonable to me… Or am I missing something?

  • http://blog.componentoriented.com D. Lambert

    Our team uses Win 2K8 R2 as a development O/S. I agree that this might not be optimal, but it's definitely not uncommon. Lots of developers use 2K8, for instance, because they need Hypervisor to run VM's. In our case, our machines are configured by another department per their standards, and we don't really have the ability to change those standards.

  • Chuckb

    Another reason, if one were needed, that opensource gets good press, even though much of it has comparable problems.

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