[Building Sakai] Feature requests for Sakai OAE

[N. Matthijs]

Hi everyone,

Now that Sakai OAE is entering a phase with a lot more deployments
and users using OAE, we've seen an increase of feature requests
and suggestions for improvements in JIRA.

In this instance, I'm referring to a feature request as a user-facing
change or improvement, which most likely needs some design
attention as well. An example of such a feature request would be
SAKIII-3609 [1].

However, bringing them in via JIRA is probably not the best
way to go about this. They're mixed in between a ton of other
JIRA tickets, so it's very easy for them to get lost. I've been
keeping a list of requests in a document, but it's not the best
way to do this and a lot of them don't make it to design. Putting
them in JIRA also makes it hard to prioritize them and get people
to weigh in as to why they are important. However, up until now
there hasn't been a better way to raise these, and I really don't
want these to get lost.

Therefore, I'd like to suggest that we try and use [2] for submitting
ideas for improvements and new features. This allows people to
submit ideas and vote on existing ideas. This should make it easier
for design to get a better idea of what the most critical issues are.
It's not the best or the prettiest system, but it is free and it is very
easy to get the data back out if we have to, so I think it's worth a
try.

I've also added a link to this into the OAE footer (will be in the v1.0.1
release). This will allow end users to make suggestions and vote as well,
and being able to collect this from across the community should be very
powerful.

I've already put some of the requests for new features that were
currently in JIRA into this system.

Suggestions for technical improvements or areas to make configurable
are definitely still fine to go into JIRA. An example of such a ticket would
be SAKIII-1973 [2]

[1] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAKIII-3609
[2] http://sakaioae.idea.informer.com/
[3] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAKIII-1973

Kind regards,
Nicolaas