You hear from us pretty often. While we absolutely want you to read Ross’ blog and factor in transaction log space in your capacity planning or listen to Perry talk about how we’ve shifted to a ser...
Published Nov 30, 2011
Version 1.0
Blog Post
Remember that your product, while deployed by techies, is used every day by average non-technical users. Microsoft, a company chalk full of IT people, seems to forget that the people using their products every day won't understand that they have to jump through hoops or pat their head and rub their tummy to get the product to do what they want. It should just work, and work right the first time.
An example of what I mean is this post:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/08/05/prevent-archiving-of-items-in-a-default-folder-in-exchange-2010.aspx
"The workaround is to have users apply the Personal never move to archive personal tag (displayed as Never under Archive Policy in Outlook/OWA) to a default folder."
Really guys... do you expect doctors, lawyers, accountants, and non-technical people in general to fully understand that request from their IT department? Even if you get some percentage of them to do it, you won't get all of them to do it, and the IT department will either feel the brunt of their furstrations or not deploy that particular part of the product altogether. This type of "just have your users do technical step X" seems to pop up over and over again, and it really isn't realistic to expect 100% (or even 50%) our end users to be able to do it.
So please.... the next time you introduce some new feature, or you come up with some "workaround" for a problem, remember who the real customer base is that will be asked to use/implement it. We simply can't turn non-technical people into techies...