Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: users

  • Ticket Inbox Zero

    Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…

  • Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

    Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…

  • Fall in Love With Cyberbullying

    Kentucky’s Bill HB775 would require those operating web sites or blogs or message boards in the state to enforce a policy to collect legal names, postal addresses, and email addresses to use the service. The legal name would, of course, be posted on the web site. Should the poster cross someone else, then the operators…

  • Page View Metric Dying

    First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • Assignments Spike CPU

    Yesterday a Blackboard Vista node went unresponsive but recovered. Then a second and third did the same. This was odd as only the test which logs into the node reported a failure. Normally, in severe unresponsive cases the Weblogic monitor either reports either one of the parameters we watch is very high or fails because…

  • Open Letter to Users of Email Autoresponders

    Hi, Some people work in positions requiring high amounts of near constant contact. There is technology for this. One popular is the Blackberry which allows the user to no longer sit in front of the computer all the time. If more than one person is capable of doing the job you do, then set up…

  • Finding Sessions

    Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session…

  • Bb 9 is NextGen?

    UPDATE: Have another source who disagrees with Badge who made the claim below. ——— Hopefully this is true. I’d hate to be spreading a false rumor. Anyone willing to confirm? 😀 According to J. L. Badge, Blackboard 9 will be the “NextGen” product we are… *cough* eagerly… *ahem* waiting to see. John Fontaine was in…

  • Naked on the Net

    The typical response to a “OMG Users Don’t Have the Privacy They Think They Do” article is to never post anything online or just never visit web sites where you would post something. These seem…. Paranoid. People have an expectation of privacy. People also inherently trust web sites unless they have been burned enough in…