[sakai-docs] Help Tool on My Workspace

[Venstra, Elizabeth]

Neal,

I have noticed some odd behavior about some of the help links for a long time.  I'm not sure if the problems I see are the same as those in generic Sakai, but here are the problems as I see them in IU's implementation of Sakai:

1. MOTD-it looks like the tool ID is sakai.announcements , which is of course the same as the Announcements tool.  The underlying tool may be the same, but from an end user point of view, they're different, and therefore they should definitely have different tool IDs, and thus, the ability to assign different help.

2. My Workspace Info Display-this has a tool ID in our implementation of sakai.iframe , which is the same as the Web Content tool!  Thus, for us, MWID currently displays Web Content help, because it seemed better to me to have Web Content for MWID than vice versa.  These should also definitely, definitely be separated, in my oh-so-humble opinion!  Of course, in our implementation, I don't think anyone ever looks at My Workspace Info Display anyway, because the MOTD is typically long enough that the former is "below the fold", as it were.  So it sort of doesn't matter.

3. We don't have Calendar or Recent Announcements displayed from My Workspace Home in our implementation; Calendar (a.k.a. Schedule) and Announcements are separate MW tools.  So, from that point of view, it seems less odd to have the same help as those tools would display in a course site.  I'm not sure what the Calendar widget is in the generic Sakai MW Home.  What is the tool ID at the end of the URL when you mouse over the blue circle with the question mark?  My guess is that the tool ID is just not being mapped to any help.  At IU, our Calendar tool in MW (which, as I said, is a separate tool) is the sakai.schedule tool ID, so it does go to the Calendar/Schedule help.

Of course, one thing to remember with most of these areas is that they may not need help at all!  My personal preferance in our IU implementation (perhaps applies less for generic Sakai) would be to have the ability to easily suppress the blue circles where there's nothing of value to tell end users.  For example, for our implementation of MOTD, if you choose to show the announcement subject, you'll see only "Important Oncourse Announcements", which might be a way to hide the MOTDs if you want to, but doesn't have much use otherwise.  And I think users can easily find that out by clicking "Options" and seeing what happens.  You don't really need a help document to tell them about it.  In my view . . . not sure how many people at IU would agree with me.

So-I do think it's JIRA-worthy, personally, to have each tool or sub-tool or whatever have its own tool ID, so that it can have separate help if appropriate.  You could then always choose to have two different tool IDs map to the same help files if you wanted-right?


Elizabeth Venstra
Knowledge Management team
University Information Technology Services
Indiana University
erytting at iu.edu<mailto:erytting at iu.edu>
812-855-0459



From: sakai-docs-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-docs-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Neal Caidin
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 7:57 AM
To: sakai-docs at collab.sakaiproject.org; Sakai QA; Sakai-Dev
Subject: [sakai-docs] Help Tool on My Workspace

[dev, qa, sakai-docs]

Hi All,

On the My Workspace page, in trunk (Sakai 10), there are five areas displayed in the frame -

My Workspace: Message of the Day
My Workspace: My Workspace Information Display
My Workspace: Calendar
My Workspace: Recent Announcements
My Workspace: Message Center Notifications

Of all of these, clicking on the question mark for Message Center Notifications is the only one that seems complete.  It explains what Message Center Notifications are, and references the display on My Workspace.
Announcements gives an overview of announcements but no context about My Workspace.
Calendar shows an overview of Help, not even any calendar-specific information.
Message of the Day (often referred to as MOTD) , shows Announcements help, which doesn't make sense to me at all.
My Workspace Information Display does go to information about My Workspace, but nothing specific about the Information Display. Maybe this makes sense?

Are these intended behaviors? Are they Jira-worthy?

Thanks,
Neal


Neal Caidin
Sakai Community Coordinator
neal.caidin at apereo.org<mailto:neal.caidin at apereo.org>
Skype: nealkdin
Twitter: ncaidin








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