Establishing the intranet users perspective when you answer a question
Mike shared an interesting comment with me today. He was asked the question “how do I change my intranet notifications settings to avoid pop-ups?”
His response was effectively to try to determine “what kind of user are you?”
By which he just meant, there are several answers to this, and I need to know what you actually mean by the question, and your own experience and training, to give you the most appropriate answer. Such a simple question but in fact in Claromentis there are several completely different ways to do this:
- As a normal user, I can just go to “My settings” and select ‘email’ rather than pop ups, from now on Claromentis will send all of my notifications to email.
- As an intranet interface designer, I can just create a child interface that I can allocate to whichever users I wish – by group, role, individuals or any combination – so they can never change their notifications settings from anything else but emails in the first place.
- As a server administrator, I can change a config file setting from a pop up to a floating DIV within the page :
$cfg_allow_background_IM_check = 2;
For anyone interested this is explained on our Intranet WIKI
This is of course such a simple question about a very small piece of intranet functionality. Imagine the range of answers to a question like “How can I effectively distribute HR information to multiple offices where policies are different..”
