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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

support.mozilla.com and community support sites

Since the Firefox Support community working group announced its PRD to create a knowledge base, forum and live chat at support.mozilla.com, many people have asked me how this will affect the community support sites around the globe. I will answer that in two parts: 1) Why we think the community driven support.mozilla.com is important 2) Community support sites are and will still be integral parts of the Mozilla community

For the long time that Mozilla has not addressed user support of Firefox, these community sites have done an incredible job providing user support on behalf of the Mozilla community. However, as the user base has grown beyond tech savvy users, the support needs for Firefox have changed. After an open planning process of a few months, the support working group has determined the best way to meet the needs of the average Firefox user is to create SUMO.

Firefox support, even on Mozilla.com, will always be community driven. We couldn’t and, just as important, wouldn’t have it any other way. We also need to increase participation beyond the current contributors to meet the expected demand. To get involved, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com.

We fully expect that community support sites will continue to meet the needs of their users after the launch of SUMO. The larger the support community there is, the better things are for Mozilla users (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc). I suspect there will be lots we can all learn from each other.


What about L10n?
The SUMO project will first be rolled out for en-US (because we have volunteers to make it happen). Locales who want to participate in the beta of SUMO are definitely welcome. Please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com for more information. Until others are rolled out, we will link to the community support sites in those locales (similar to what we do now).

Firefox support platform vendor selection call today

Tuesday, July 3rd at 2pm pacific time-- we will decide between the mediawiki/drupal, tikiwiki and jive software systems for the support knowledge base and forum platform.

Call in details:
* California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
* Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
* Toll-free: 800-707-2533 (866-879-4799 as a backup) then password 369
* Conference bridge: 280

Agenda:
General overview of process
Walk through of matrix for each solution
Decision time!

The latest of the requirements matrix:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pnnxzqhCygtc_zRTAr0C-VQ

What a trip! Mozilla's last few days in Brazil cap off an amazing week

This is my last posting from Brazil. It has been an incredibly successful and worthwhile trip! We have traveled to 4 different cities in 8 days, collaborated with enthusiastic and talented students at 6 of the top universities, met with representatives from the largest portals and sites in Brazil (UOL.com, Globo.com and Buscape.com), spoke to more than 1000 people about the importance of Firefox in keeping the web free and open, been interviewed by 3 of the top news outlets in Brazil, treated many of our pt-br Firefox localization team to a pizza dinner and learned invaluable information about a very important country for Mozilla’s future.

We have met so many wonderful and dedicated (or soon to be dedicated) Mozilla community members. They are the reason why there are more than 3.5 million Brazilians using Firefox today and will be the reason that number continues to increase. At one of our community gatherings, one of our volunteers commented on how much he appreciated our live updates on this blog. He said that he really felt that we (Mozilla) are really trying to understand Brazil and to make the web better for the 30 million and growing Brazilians who use the web. Ultimately though, no one will know Brazil better than our Brazilian community leaders—we look forward to helping in your efforts to spread Firefox.

One of the most important things we learned during the past 8 days is that almost 70% of Brazilians access the internet using IE 6. And, many, if not most of them are using an unlicensed version of Windows (no one knew the exact number, but the general consensus is that the number is very high). With no Window’s license, these users don’t get updates to Windows or to IE 6. That means that the majority of Brazilian internet users are very venerable to the many nasty attacks out there on the web. The good news is that Firefox can help. Because Firefox has an awesome automatic updater that runs outside of the Window’s update system, Firefox users easily and quickly get the most up to date version of Firefox to keep them safe on the web. This problem was reiterated to us everywhere we went in Brazil-- many of our community members have volunteered to help explore ways to get this message out. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them.

A few highlights of the last 2 days:
We spoke to the engineering, marketing and product teams at UOL.com, Brazil’s largest portal and incredibly gracious hosts. We also met with some of the founders of Buscape.com, which is very similar to Shopping.com and is a leader in Brazil and a fast grower around Latin America. We also made presentations to students at Unicamp (University of Campinas) and the University of Sao Paulo, where we were asked everything from “how did you come up with the name Firefox” to “how to I get involved in other ways besides coding.”



The highlights of the past 2 days were definitely our Mozilla community gathering and our dinner with localization team. At the community gathering, we spent more than three hours brainstorming ways of spreading Firefox, trying to get their perspective of the state of the web in Brazil and then did a general question and answer session. The future of Mozilla Brazil was definitely sitting in that room! We also were fortunate enough (even though it was a 21 hour day) to be able to have dinner with many of our localizers for Firefox. I think the picture of the group shows how much fun it can be to be a key contributor to Firefox.

My favorite two non-Mozilla pictures and a general thought:
These are both from the small airport we flew in to on our way to Sao Carlos. One is a sign that shows the systems of the Dengue Virus (very nasty as you can see). This sign was right next to the security area and was unlike anything I had seen before. The other photo is the “luggage belt” where you pick up your luggage after your arrival. One side of the glass is where the airline employees unload the baggage and right on the other side of the glass is where we stand to pick it up (just a few feet away). All the locals liked to make jokes about it, so I thought I would pass it along to you.



















Finally—I just wanted to mention that the people here were incredibly hospitable, engaging, friendly and very helpful during our trip. To everyone who helped make that possible, especially long time Mozilla contributor Marcio Galli, I (and Asa) say thanks!

Mozilla in Sao Carlos (in photos)

Another incredibly successful day in Brazil-- this time we were joined by longtime Mozilla developer and evangelist Marcio Galli. We spoke to packed crowds at the Federal University of Sao Carlos and the University of Sao Paulo in San Carlos, both some of the most competitive and elite schools in Brazil. We met many Firefox fans-- some of whom threw a Firefox 2 launch party by creating what was supposedly the world's largest hamburger (and then they ate it!). There was lots of great brainstorming around how to get organized in Brazil and what the first tasks/stunts/events should be.

We spend the next two days in Sao Paulo with completely packed schedules, so updates are likely to be a little less frequent. Over the course of the trip, we should speak to more than 1000 Mozilla enthusiasts explaining how to get involved spreading Firefox.





Check out all the photo's at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/asadotzler/

Firefox Support Next Steps

The Firefox Support working group has made a great deal of progress in our effort to improve support for Firefox users. After getting feedback on our support plan overview and product requirements document, we are now ready to put the plan in action. In this post, I will give a brief overview of our implementation timeline, with a focus on our two most important next steps: staffing and the support platform.

Staffing
In order for this plan to happen, Mozilla needs an employee (at a minimum) who is dedicated full time to our community based Firefox support. We currently have an open job for someone to coordinate the day to day operations of Firefox support. Please pass this along to someone you know (or apply yourself!).

Support Coordinator (apply at careers@mozilla.com)
Brief job description:
The Support Coordinator will be responsible for the definition and implementation of highly leveraged global support strategies and programs to improve Firefox’s user support.

Responsibilities:
Develop support platform timeline with working group and drive implementation of Firefox support platform on Mozilla.com
• Work with UI, marketing creative and user education teams to take ownership of roll out of certain aspects of the support platform
• Oversee content migration, population and editing
• Establish best practices for knowledge base, forums and live chat
Mobilize volunteers for successful platform roll out and continued support
Spearhead efforts to recruit and train more volunteers
Develop and track metrics to ensure quality user support and healthy support community
Identity, develop and support volunteer community
Upgrade support platform as necessary
Develop and implement formal feedback loops
Serve as primary interface for support between marketing, product, QA and engineering
Responsible for overall user care efforts (including responding to letters, voicemails, etc.)

Choosing a platform
We have decided to build a prototype of the support platform using MediaWiki to power the knowledge base and Drupal to power the forum and other interfaces. These open source solutions, with their current plug-ins, should give us many of the features that we require, along with the flexibility to customize to the needs of our project. MediaWiki powers most of the other Mozilla wiki's as well as large scale sites. Mozilla currently uses Drupal for spreadfirefox.com.

Building a beta knowledgebase
The first phase of our prototyping will be a knowledge base beta with a main search interface. The development of the knowledge base will have two components that will run concurrently: content as well as design and development. If you would like to participate in this development process, please contact me at jt at mozilla dot com (really looking for someone with MediaWiki experience).

Firefox Support Timeline v1

June:
Knowledge base style guide and inventory complete
Knowledge base design
July:
Content migration, development and editing
August
Support coordinator on board
Beta version of knowledge base and support interface live

As always, your feedback and participation is important. I look forward to hearing from you.