Friday, September 21, 2007
SUMO knowledge base to be live September 28!
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!
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.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Please give us feedback on the forum home page 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
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
IRC: #SUMO
Friday, August 17, 2007
Introducing our Firefox Support 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
Saturday, August 4, 2007
We need your feedback on the Firefox support site alpha
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
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...
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.
Friday, July 27, 2007
1 week until SUMO knowledge base alpha-- we need your help!
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
47 out of 64 Firefox support articles claimed (WOW)!
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
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
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!
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!
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
support.mozilla.com and community support sites
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).
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Firefox support platform vendor selection call today
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
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Firefox Support Next Steps
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.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Firefox Help Needs Your Help
To date, Mozilla community volunteers have provided Firefox user support that has met, and often exceeded, the needs of the tech and the early adopter users of Firefox. As Firefox’s market share grows beyond early adopters, our user support needs also to evolve. The Firefox Support Working Group has spent the last month doing research and community outreach on how Mozilla should evolve user support through a community based approach.
We've had dozens of community volunteers participate through open phone calls, in person meetings, forum posts, blog posts and emails. As a result of this process, we have developed a draft overview and product requirements document for Firefox Support.
In order for this to be successful, we need your feedback and your help. Please check out the overview and give us your thoughts. If you want to be more involved, you can join the support planning mailing list. To see others' comments, check out the Google Group.
Thanks for your help. We look forward to hearing from you.
JT