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RSS FeedJune 26th, 2008
Review of Confluence – Enterprise Wiki
Our business partners have been using the Confluence Enterprise Wiki for almost two years now, and as part of that, I use it on and off. Finally, the day has come when I am just going to rebel.
What is surprising to me is that this software sells! People in fact use it! How, why, I really do not know. As a user, I have never really been a fan of it. The UI is kloogy, nothing is intuitive, and even filling out a resource feedback form requires training. When I look at the Confluence website, I find that they claim the features such as top grade security and searchability. Thankfully, they don’t claim “Highly usable!” as their forte, and in this tiny respect I agree with them.
Some other peeves (opportunities for improvement – if you are an Atlassian person)
- It uses some wickedly technical labels like: “Hide Children”, “View in Hierarchy”, “Add Child Page”?
Are these labels for real, or they were left behind before the user testing was done?
[To give credit where it is due, there are some more meaningful labels such as Add Spreadsheet etc.] - The hierarchy of a space is not clear at all. If you end up in an unfamiliar corner of the neighborhood, you may have to click Back Back Back to find your spot.
- Extremely slow: Now, you could blame this on the server, on the hosting, but I know other applications hosted on same platform, running about 4 times faster than Confluence. (Not all of them are Java, but as I user, I don’t really care.)
- No Web 2.0: This software was probably developed in 1990s, and was fit for that time. Most of us have been spoilt by fancier software such as Blogger, Yahoo Mail, and can’t stand a delay of 10 seconds just to show a “Saved successfully” dialog.
So, that is that. If you happen to agree or disagree with what I said, just leave me a comment.
June 20th, 2008
My favorite Word 2007 peeve
Considering that Word 2007 is such a popular software application, I used to think that Microsoft’s Office development team should have implemented every single feature they could think of and justify. Isn’t that logical to believe – this team has access to huge budget, and is under pressure from competition (including online document management tools), so really, if they can think of a good feature, they should implement it, right?
How about this one:
When you try to update the “Update Table of Contents” feature, it gives you this option:
So, what does this option mean – why is it even presented? I can think of two reasons: (i) for efficiency, updating the page numbers is easier and faster than updating the entire table, or (ii) if the user deliberately does not want to add new sections into the ToC (this happens, I know).
The basic problem with this feature is that it does not allow setting of a default, so it always pops up, and assuming it is 99% of the case, when user wants to update the entire table, the user has to select the right choice and click OK. Disgusting.
Let us focus on efficiency for a minute – how long would it take to update the entire table anyway, if the document is 10 pages long? For short documents, the efficiency gain is simply meaningless and not worth the hassle of this dialog. With faster computers, I think unless the document is more than 40 pages long, the time to update the entire ToC would still be less than 3 seconds, so not really worth this extra option.
So, how about Word 2007 do this instead:
- Allow a checkbox on this option dialog, that allows user to always update the entire table, unless the Alt key is down or the document is too large. Then, if it is a small document (say up to 100 pages), update the entire table. If it is a large document, show this option anyway.
- If the Alt key is down, show this option.
Ok, now that I have shown you my pet peeve, let me also present two partial solutions to it:
(i) Keyboard Shortcuts – My fingers are programmed to: Right click key, U, Alt E, Enter. This basically selects the “Update entire table” option and hits enter.
(ii) Using a macro – You can program a macro to do the same thing, I use Ctrl-R (for refresh).
What are your least favorite Word 2007 features?
June 10th, 2008
Architecture Astronauts or not
I love blogging about other blogs. And criticizing other critiques. So, here it comes – I believe Joel’s rant on groove is entirely unfounded. My reasoning is extremely simple – I use Groove, and it solves many practical problems for us. There are alternatives to Groove, of course, but that is not Joel’s criticism.