Today we’ve finished the first testing phase of ALOE - thanks a lot to all the beta testers for their engagement and their very helpful comments and feedback!

So, what did we learn in the last days?

• The system was running very stable - we didn’t have a single system crash! Maybe the latest HP update was removing most of the trouble we had before.
• The interface seems to work very fine for firefox, internet explorer, and safari. At least nobody complained
• Encoding ist still causing some trouble. We tried to do as much as possible with Unicode, but sometimes you don’t care…and suddenly notice that the DB on your server is running with ISO-8859-1. Bah…there’s some stuff left to do!
• We need some additional explanations on the pages as well as an FAQ page in the system to which we can refer. E.g., some of our testers complained they didn’t understand the meaning of certain metadata fields.
• The use of an external web page thumbnailer is not a real good solution. Especially when the service you use does no longer deliver any thumbnails We’re now developing our own thumbnailer…
• The group and visibility management will be changed. First of all, every user will have the possibility to share public resources to groups (when he or she is member of the group). And as the owner of a resource, you can chose to restrict the visibility of the resource (as “private” or “for certain groups only”).
• The privacy settings in the user profiles should of course include that you can’t be found in a “member search” when somebody looks for data you’ve decided to hide - sorry for that!

The ALOE team will have some stuff to do in the following weeks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.