Proposal - Gnome Trainer/Interviewer

["Tom Musgrove" <TomM pentstar com>]

A primary cost to businesses is training on software.

Training can take significant time to do, may require the hiring of a
trainer, or the purchase of training software, and often the individual is
paid while being trained.  In addition, the training that an individual
receives is often is not adapted to the individuals needs, covering only a
limited amount of relevant and/or unknown material.

Realizing this, training/retraining costs will be a significant barrier to
adoption of Free Software for commercial companies.

To substantially reduce the costs associated with training on Gnome and
other Free Software, I propose the following


1)  Each Program should have a cheat sheet/outline of the most commonly used
commands.  They should be designed similar to the laminated course summarys
that can be purchased at College Campus Bookstores.

2)  Each Program should have a quick interviewer that asks the users
familiarity with other software in the same Genre, thus if the program is
AbiWord, then they would be asked their usage of MS Word, WordPerfect, etc.
Questions as to establish the user level for the software, as well as the
type of work that the user does, should also be asked.  This way the most
relevant functions for the users profession can be highlighted, and the
softwares features can be quickly explained by their comparison with how
they are similar to, or differ from other software that they are familiar
with.

3)  Every time a program is upgraded and ran for the first time (since the
upgrade), there should be a popup screen that tells what features and
enhancements are new in this release.

4)  The visual help part of the Ultimate Help System, can be used to guide
an individual through actions for the first time, and could easily be used
to run a quick training seminar on the most relevant features.

your thoughts and comments would be appreciated,

Tom M.
TomM pentstar com