Trend Taiwan – Day 2

Today I spent time with the User Interface team talking to them about how the product looks and how they expose features of the product to us. I’ve seen some very cool previews of things to come and taken a lot of the feedback that people have given me direct to the team that make the design decision. Thanks to Charlene, Jecy, Theresa and Mayur for the chance to do this.

So some specifics…

How would you like to see a one button install for CSM for SMB on an SBS server? Ideally I think it could be done given that on an SBS we know certain things about how the product should be configured. We know it has IIS installed, we know the exchange server name and all of the normal options that we would use. In fact I change nothing of the default install right now. So why not have an install where we have the ability to enter the activation code and then select Default (after which we don’t have to do anything until the product is installed) or Custom for all other options. This is one of the ideas that has come out of discussions here today that could make life easier for us in the SMB IT Pro space.

What about the documentation that comes with CSM for SMB? Well – good news on that front. They have a new technical writer that is aiming to raise the level of the documentation above the waterline and make it more relevant to the SMB IT Pro. Instead of “click next… click save” they will streamline the documentation to show the navigation path and the field names with explanation of things that are not easily recognisable. In addition they are considering having an online PDF document that has inbuilt shockwave videos of particular points. This should make it easier for first time administrators to get a better understanding of the product.

I’m hoping to be able to post some screenshots tomorrow of a few things that I’ve seen today 🙂