Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Omni update and website update

I pushed out some changes to the Omni Customer Support website tonight. The biggest part was adding some screenshots. I think they came out OK. Of course after you have your images, you think of what should be different, so you do edit the data, layout, etc. and take a new screen capture. Then the process repeats itself. I'm trying to do a little bit each night on the website to help flush it out. It's starting to get there.

On the product, I got several major changes out yesterday (and one minor bug fix in tonight.) The major changes were creating tags on issues, adding balloon hints on startup, adding the concepts of data sets, adding a sample data set and started the beginning of the Help Data set. Data sets are independent, and you can only search in the active data set. This allows you to have one data set for product A and another one for product B. It also allows me to have a Help data set and the sample data set.

I modified the search ranking algorithm a bit with the introduction of tags. As it stands now, the title is the heaviest, then tags, then description and solution. This has resulted in relevant rankings in my testing so far. It might be something that I open up to allow the user to modify.

I tried to make a flash movie tonight to put up on the web. I always want to see one and I think it will actually show off the product well. But it just about killed my machine. I had to many programs up when I tried it. It came out OK, but I need to rehearse it a few times. I'm going to opt for call outs vs. using audio. I'm trying to use CamStudio, I've used it before in the past but never with the screen annotations, It is going to take a bit to get a version I'm happy with.

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