[1157] in IS Home Pages
Re: Draft of short i/s article on software support sheets
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin M. Cunningham)
Fri Apr 7 00:48:04 2000
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Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2000 00:47:42 -0400
To: Robyn Fizz <fizz@mit.edu>
From: "Kevin M. Cunningham" <kcunning@MIT.EDU>
Cc: swrt@mit.edu, is-home@mit.edu, cavan@mit.edu
>If you have comments or questions about the pages, contact the Software
>Release Team at <swrt@mit.edu>. ø
The article looks fine to me, except for the line cited above.
It would seem to imply that *any* comments or questions about the Product Release pages (including, for instance, comments about typos, suggested changes, related training courses, questions about how to use a product, comments on the page design, inquiries about where a User Group is being held, etc. etc.) should be sent to swrt@mit.edu. I think this is certainly not the right list for such feedback -- swrt@mit.edu is currently just Jonathan, Ginny, Bill, and Theresa, and even if the list is expanded soon to include Product Release Coordinators etc. (and the Directors were removed to save them the hassle of getting every last piece of mail about the product pages), it would still be incomplete for answering general questions about the pages. That task would be well and appropriately triaged by the list is-home@mit.edu, which is already set up for exactly that kind of activity. And many questions are best sent directly to the IS consulting group responsible for the product (e.!
g., the Help Desk). (Links to all of these resources are available on the pages themselves.)
On the other hand, feedback specifically about the list of "supported" software (i.e., why a product is include/excluded, requests for IS to support a newer version of a product or drop support for an older version, feedback about incompatabilities with MIT infrastructure, IS's strategic orientation to supporting products, and, most of all, questions about the role and activities of the newly-formed Software Release team) -- yes, those seem the appropriate province of the swrt@mit.edu list, certainly as a starting place.
Maybe that's what is meant in the last line of the article. But as currently phrased, the pointer to swrt@mit.edu, I think, suggests the more general kind of question, and these should not go just to swrt@mit.edu.
Maybe the line could be rewritten as:
"If you have comments or questions for the new team, send email to <swrt@mit.edu>."
It could even be absorbed in the previous paragraph so that it really is clear that comments about the Software Release process and the overall "supported products" strategy are meant, not questions like "how do I download Eudora on my Mac?"
--Kevin
