RE: [Evolution] Some more ideas.

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentawall com>]

You mentioned an interviewing process.  That is something that I would like
to see for all of the Gnome productivity apps.  First, a questionaire as to
the users experience with other operating systems, and their degree of
expertise in them.  (Ie MacOS, Win 3.0/95/98/NT/2K, Sun, Linux, and other
Unixes, etc.).  Next they'd be interviewed on their degree of experience
with various productivity software/office suites.  There might also be an
interview as to their work field/common activities, volume of email,
willingness to learn, etc.  For specific apps, there might also be a
questionaire about what features they used in their old apps.

Then a tutorial/description could be generated based on those responses.
Highlighting the additional feature set that we have compared to the
software they are familiar with.  A breif summary of analagous functions and
wheter there is a difference in usage/implementation details.  Finally there
should be a list of what functionality other products have that we do not,
and wheter or not they are planned to be implemented (if not why not...
etc.)

Additionally a command summary card (like the full size laminated cheat
sheets/course summaries that you can purchase in most college book stores),
would be really cool.  It should be printable by the user and alternative
purchaseable through helixcode or some such (say licensing through one of
the course summary creators...).

This should substantially reduce retraining/transition time, and expose a
feature set tuned to the users needs.  With the time savings that could be
achieved through the additional features that have been thought up and
planned, this could quickly conquer sales and technical support offices.
(And likely secretarial pools and any other areas of the work force that
'lives' in communication and productivity software.)

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com