From: Adam C. Greenfield, User Experience Manager
The Portal team has been busy preparing for a release, originally scheduled for yesterday (Monday), however due to some finishing touches we wanted to include (and a last minute bug fix) it will finally launch tomorrow morning (Wednesday).
One of the things we discussed today was trying to release more frequently. When I started my involvement with the Portal effort we set a goal of one release a month. At this point it has been far longer than that and as a result preparing this release has been a much larger task than expected for the team. We have agreed tentatively to try to make one small release every sprint now. Our sprints are two weeks at a time so that would be roughly two releases a month.
This coming week I’m heading out to our corporate headquarters in Denver, CO to do planning with our Product Managers and the Platform Engineering team. Today I had a conversation with one of the Platform Engineers about some of the exciting new functionality we will be launching for our Cloud in the near future. The platform guys and our production support folks have finished most of the backend of these new features – we plan to get them integrated in the portal in short order.
We have a Sprint Planning for our Portal team scheduled on Monday – so if you could add one feature to our Customer Portal today, what would it be? Feel free to answer publically in the comments below or privately by e-mail (my first name at hosting dot com).
Tags: agile, cloud, customer portal, denver, release
Improved performace all around, especially for the cloud management interfaces. Perhaps starting with cached data for AJAX queries.
Fair enough, not quite a feature in the way I envisioned when I wrote this post, but obviously a worthy goal and useful improvement.
Ok then – I can play ball with a new “feature” as opposed to a “goal”… How about an API for various functions…
In a perfect world, all portal functionality exposed via an API would be nice, but probably unrealistic.
In order of preference:
1) DNS Management
2) Server Stats (data and/or graphs)
.. big gap in level of desire …
3) Server Management (reconfiguring)
4) Ticket Management
The first two are the only ones I really see myself using a lot, but there’s a chance #3 and #4 would be used more… especially if you figure out how to successfully move a VMK file from dedicated hosting to vCloud for simple server replication…