Friday, September 21, 2007

SUMO knowledge base to be live September 28!

Thanks to all the hard work of the SUMO community, the SUMO knowledge base will be going live to the public on Friday, September 28th!

We will initially roll-out the knowledge base with links from blog posts and one link from the current Firefox support page. We will be testing the stability and scalability of the site while getting valuable feedback on the support. After the initial testing and feedback phase, we will begin to roll out the site to a wider audience.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed thus far. It has been an amazing team effort! If you want to get involved, visit our "get involved" page.

FYI-- we will have a timeline public for the forums and the live chat by the end of next week.

Welcome David Tenser!

Please welcome David Tenser, our new SUMO Project Manager! We are all very excited to have David working on the SUMO project and back in the Mozilla family.

David is a longtime contributor to Mozilla and the Firefox and Thunderbird support sites,
authoring major parts of help content from the early days of the Foundation. Originally from Eskilstuna, Sweden, David has a BS and MS informatics and computer science. David was most recently Chief Software Engineer at Emsize AB in Sweden, where he led the development of supply chain software in the packaging industry. He recently participated in the Mozilla Memory bank project-- you should check out his conversation with them.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Updating the update page

As you likely saw when you upgraded to the most recent version of Firefox, we show you a landing page to tell you that you have updated to the latest and most secure version of Firefox. We have also traditionally used that page as a way to communicate to you (and all the other users), most often about add-ons. We think that page could use a little work....

Below you will find the screen shots of the new versions of the page. Please check them out and give us your feedback.

Our primary audience is people who have not tried add-ons before; either because they have never heard of them or they don't quite understand what and how useful they are. We hope to use the learnings from this effort to continue to improve how we communicate the "customization" benefit of Firefox across all of our properties.

We will be testing two versions of the update page. The first version is similar to our current update page, but with a design, copy and UI changes. Please note that with both versions of the page, we have included the "release notes" to tell people what changed when they updated Firefox as well as an easy way for them to go to their homepage if they are not interested in trying out add-ons.


















The goal of our second page (below) is to introduce the user to specific add-ons from the start. We think that even if these specific add-ons aren't appealing, the user will quickly "get" what an add-on is and will be interested in seeing more.
















This page is the "landing page" that users will click through to if they are interested in seeing more add-ons. This page will also have a link to the full add-ons site. We will be testing two different versions of this page: one that shows 6 add-ons to users and one that shows 10. For all pages that show add-ons, we will be rotating add-ons through and tracking to see which ones were downloaded the most often.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

SUMO meeting postponed to Friday at 3pm pacfic time

Sorry for the late notice, but this week's SUMO weekly meeting has been postponed to tomorrow at 3 pm pacific time.

Looking forward to our call tomorrow!

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Please give us feedback on the forum home page mock-up

We have been having lots of back and forth about the design of the SUMO forum home page. After much discussion and feedback, we have developed this mock-up:


For a general reference for comparison, please check out the SUMO homepage: http://support-stage.mozilla.org

Goals of this page:
1. To ensure that the user has searched through the knowledge base.
2. To get the user to search through the forum to find an answer to their problem.
3. If they can't get their answer in 1 or 2, we want to make it easy for them to ask their question (we are currently missing a good explanation of how the forum works-- maybe that is a call-out box that we link to-- any ides?)
4. Make it easy for people to log-in and/or track their current questions

I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback here.

To get involved with the SUMO project, check out our contributor page.

Join us for our weekly SUMO project meetings

This will be a weekly, public call to discuss the progress of the SUMO project. Please join us!

Thursday from 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm pacific time

Phone call details:
  • California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
  • Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
  • Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369
Then, enter your bridge number : 280

IRC: #SUMO

Friday, August 17, 2007

Introducing our Firefox Support leadership team

As a result of all the hard work of the support community, the Firefox Support Working Group has officially transitioned to the SUMO team. I am very excited to announce our SUMO leadership team:

David Tenser has been hired as the Firefox Support Project Manager. David is a long-time Mozilla volunteer and was responsible for much of the original support documentation for Mozilla (all the way back to the Phoenix days). David is joining us from Sweden, where he most recently served as a Chief Software Architect.

Chris Ilias, Jason Barnabe and Lucy Connor will join the SUMO leadership team as leaders of the knowledge base, forums and live chat, respectively. Chris, Jason and Lucy have not only been active support volunteers for many years, but have shown tremendous dedication to SUMO and are responsible for much of the progress so far.

Please join me in thanking David, Chris, Jason and Lucy for all their work and welcoming them to their new roles.

As a part of the new SUMO leadership team, I will be scheduling a weekly SUMO call that will be open to the public. I will post more details on the date and call-in info once it has been scheduled.

Update on status of support.mozilla.com:
We have been running performance testing on our current tikiwiki implementation as well as comparison tests for mediawiki and drupal. This data should give us a good understand of the scalability of our current implementation. We will publish the results early next week.

Also, we need your feedback on the forum design. Check it out here:
http://babyhook.com/SUMO/
username: forum
password: design

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Enterprise Working Group Call Wednesday morning

From wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise:

We’re planning our second call for Wednesday, August 8th at 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern, 17:00 UTC. Here’s the meeting details:

  • 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x91 Conf# 280 (US/INTL)
  • 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 280 (US)
  • IRC - irc.mozilla.org - #ewg

The theme is "Wishlist." Please feel free to update the Wishlist page before the call.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

We need your feedback on the Firefox support site alpha

Thanks to the tremendous work of the Firefox support community, the SUMO alpha is now live at http://support-stage.mozilla.org.

We need your help to kick the tires of the new site and to tell us whether or not you think the content will be helpful for the average Firefox user. To give feedback on a particular article, please do so in the comments section on the article's page. For all feedback related to the actual site (not articles), please post your comments at the SUMO newsgroup.

Thanks again everyone for all your help. We still have more articles to write, more articles to edit and more work to be done on the SUMO site, but now is an appropriate time to celebrate all the hard work and accomplishments thus far!

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

L10n of support.mozilla.com

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about localization of the Firefox support project on support.mozilla.com.

The first step in localization is launching the beta en-US version of SUMO. Once we have a few weeks of good user feedback and data, we can determine which support articles are the most useful and stable (there is even a metric for this!). The most useful/stable articles will be rank ordered for localization.

Why the useful/stable metric? We want to make sure that users in all locales have current and correct articles. Some locale support teams will be robust enough to manage all the necessary changes in existing and new content. Some locales, though, will have smaller teams who will need to do high leverage translation—so we want to make sure the articles they translate aren’t going to change the next day.

The SUMO knowledge base beta should be live in September. We are hoping to begin localization of SUMO no later than October for those locales who want to participate. To help make this process easier, there will be a staging area for localized content before the support.mozilla.com platform is launched in your locale. If you want to get involved, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

What if I don’t just want to translate? We know that there are some support issues that are unique to particular locales. We also know that different locales have different ways of approaching technical support. Mozilla wants to ensure that all of our volunteers have the correct information so that they can figure out the best way to share that content with users in your locale.

I just got a support phone call for Firefox...

...and it reconfirmed to me why the work we are doing on Firefox support is very important.

All she needed help with was to import her bookmarks from IE, but she had no idea where to do it and then where to look for them (she may have actually imported them as a part of the install-- she didn't think so-- but that is beside the point). The point is that our work on SUMO will positively impact the daily lives of Firefox users. This was a woman who was told to use Firefox because it would make her online banking easier and better. Think of all the people like this who we will be able to help keep or even turn in to passionate users of Firefox.

The phone call also reaffirmed to me that we have a long way to go content wise on SUMO. We have are off to a great start, but there are still so many things that people need help with. That said, I still do think our strategy of getting the initial article list live and then using the learnings from how people actually use the SUMO site (what they search for, etc.) to determine what new content we create is the correct one. Using those learnings will also tell us how we can make all this great content easy to find--even when users don't know exactly what they are looking for (which is equally important).

So, thanks again to everyone for all your hard work. You can still get involved. Visit our SUMO contributor page to learn how.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Seeding Mozilla marketing in India and beyond

Mozilla in India...
Seth B., Manager of Mozilla's community giving program, and Chris Hofmann (chofmann), Director of Special Projects for Mozilla, went on a 2 week community building trip to India as a part of our larger objective of seeding Mozilla marketing around the world. Seth's blog has an incredible account of the trip (many great blog posts). I recommend that you check it out. A quick summary is that Seth and Chofmann both feel that the Mozilla community in India is incredibly vibrant and excited to help spread Firefox.

... and Beyond
As I mentioned earlier, Rishi, one of our interns, has been researching the state of the web and the state of Mozilla in Russia, Australia, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, Canada and Mexico. We will be publishing what we have learned within the next week. We look forward to your feedback on the information and possible next steps.

What's up in Brazil and Argentina? Lots!
I have heard from a few of our Brazil volunteers that they have begun organizing action teams around getting local computer makers (small businesses-- almost like mom and pop shops) to put Firefox on all the computers they build. Mozilla Argentina volunteers are testing a similar program at Internet Cafes/LAN Houses. We are all excited to hear how these efforts work and see if they can be replicated elsewhere.

Friday, July 27, 2007

1 week until SUMO knowledge base alpha-- we need your help!

If all goes to plan, the Firefox Support Working group will be pushing the support.mozilla.com knowledge base live for community review next Friday, August 3rd.

We still have some open articles, as well as plenty of claimed articles that need writing and editing. Check our our community contributor page to learn how you can help. It is going to take a full team effort to get the alpha live by the end of the week, but given the overwhelming response thus far, I think it is doable.

Forum design feedback needed
We are now in the process of designing the look and feel of the SUMO forums. If you have any feedback on what they should look like (remember, we have already chosen TikiWiki as the solution) or any examples of easy to use support forums out there, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

Do you know any good chat solutions?
We also are looking for live chat solutions. If you know of any good easy to use chat solutions, please pass those along too!

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

First Enterprise Working Group call a success!

As I mentioned earlier, we now have an Enterprise Working Group that is exploring how we can make Firefox easier to use/deploy for large organizations (companies, schools, governments, universities).

Check out a quick recap of today's discussion. Thanks to everyone who participated.

The next call will focus on improvements/features in Firefox that would be helpful for enterprises. We are still looking for participants in the group, so definitely feel free to join. Once we have details for the next call, I will also post them here.

47 out of 64 Firefox support articles claimed (WOW)!

We are on a roll here folks! Great work by a large number of volunteers.

If you want to get involved, please jump on in today! Get started now and claim your article(s). It is an easy way to have a major impact on millions of Firefox users.

I will be posting more information soon on SUMO next steps.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

28 of 64 Firefox support articles claimed

Saturday has been a busy day for the Firefox support article writers. We now have people signed up to write 28 of the 64 articles needs to launch the SUMO project.

You too can join in the fun! Get started now and claim your article(s). It is an easy way to have a major impact on millions of Firefox users.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Get 'em while they're hot: write a Firefox support article

12 of the 64 Firefox support articles have already been claimed... sign-up for an article today before you miss out!

The number of people who have volunteered for this project has been amazing so far (10 different people-- none of them paid to do it)! Get started now (even if you can't write the article today-- put your name next to the article you want to write).

Can't decide whether or not you should do it?
Tens of millions of Firefox users will benefit from your work. We make it easy to get involved and we are definitely happy to answer your questions.

Don't have the time?
Writing an article shouldn't take too much time. We have done much of the research for you. Most of the articles have sources you can refer to in writing the article. Plus, it is way more fun that doing your laundry.

But JT, I'm a really, really, really bad writer: If you can't write, I'm sure you are good at communicating in other ways. Use those skills to get others to help out.

I don't know how to use the wiki?
Tell me which article you want to write (jt at mozilla dot com) and I will sign you up. Then, write the article, send it to me and I will post it for you.

The SUMO project is a Mozilla wide effort that needs your help. Get started today. Thanks in advance!

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Write a Firefox support article today!

After many months of hard work, we are now ready to start writing support documentation for the support.mozilla.com project!

This is an awesome way to impact the experience of tens of millions of people in a very real way. Let’s be honest, how often do you get to do that? Whether you are an engineer, writer, marketer, salesperson, student or none of the above, you can write support documentation for Firefox. It’s easy to get started!

But I am not a good writer! No problem… we need people who can write out the core content. Once we have that, we can have people who are “writers” and “editors” clean it up and make it sound pretty.

Get started now by following the instructions on our “Get Started Now” page!

Update:
We are 1 down and have 63 more to go! (Congrats to Andrew for finishing the first draft!)

I will be posting daily updates on our progress. Please help us spread the word!

Monday, July 16, 2007

Join the Firefox Enterprise Working Group

Firefox has shown incredible growth in the consumer market over the past few years. We have done that through laser focus on developing a product with the user's interests driving our decisions (in addition to a little marketing and lots of happy users spreading the word). With that focus on users, we have not been as focused on serving large organizations. While we do know that some major corporations deploy Firefox, we haven't been able to address their needs with the same veracity that we have for individual users (luckily we are an open source organization!).

To help figure out what can be done to make Firefox the best choice for enterprises (we define this as large companies as well as non-profits, educational institutions, governments and even medium size businesses), some Firefox community members have gathered to form the Firefox Enterprise Working Group.

The group will take a similar approach to the Firefox Support Working Group: understand the current state of the market, identify ways to improve our support of enterprise and build consensus around what action is possible by Mozilla community and MoCo. I am looking forward to working with them.


Check out the info from the two community leaders Michael and Yuriy:
What
The first Global call focused on the Enterprise Working Group around Firefox is currently scheduled for July 25, 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern, 17:00 UTC.
Where
Please see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise for Objectives, Rules of Engagement, and Dial-in Info.
How
Each of the calls will be organized around a central theme, with the primary goal being to simply communicate information and document that information, in the hopes that people inside and outside the group can learn from our experiences.

P.S. Figuring out enterprise is particularly important in locales where a majority of users access the internet through the workplace (or at least a large percentage of them). For us to ensure meaningful market share, we don't necessarily need a full outbound enterprise program overnight, but we do need to work well for those who are interested in using Firefox. That is what we are trying to figure.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Firefox market share trending up globally

Thanks to all the hard work of the Mozilla community, Firefox market share is trending up all over the globe. Check out this Xiti Monitor article (in French) that goes in to more detail. Hopefully, with our efforts to help develop and support the marketing communities in each locale, we can help accelerate this growth.