Hi everyone, Le 2012-12-28 12:39, Cor Nouws a écrit :
Hi Florian, all, (taking advantage of discussion so far..) Florian Monfort wrote (27-12-12 11:34)I've seen a lot of browsers recently moving towards silent updates. I was wondering whether this could be a relevant approach for LibreOffice or not.Changes in office suites can have far more impact... So it's not for nothing that both power users and companies won't like it. But of course, just as our current update notification, it would be quite easy to make it - whenever it comes through - optional.Indeed I've seen many people complaining about LibreOffice features, UI etc. While using LibreOffice 3.4... Of course the first advice is "just upgrade" but for people I doesn't seem like such a good think to do, just like it somewhat scares them. I'm pretty sure that happens with at least half of our userbase.Since the difficulties in getting to silent updates (it's not yet technically close; it should be turned off by default, so then how to convince people that they turn it on ;-) .. ) I would propose another view at the current situation: every opportunity to explain users something is a chance for communication and thus better mutual understanding :-)What do you guys think? I think this would improve the overall quality of our userbase making sure that almost everyone has the very last stable version, with all the fixes and improvements it brings. Plus, for once we wouldn't be copying MS Office...Hmm, there are for sure cases in which we did not, and also the other way round happens! Cheers,
As also previously mentioned in one of the responses, I also believe that the current etiquette is that any changes to software via updates are to be made optional to users whether silent or not. Defaults are usually set to no automatic update unless the user permits auto-update.
I don't believe it to be to our users advantage to update a package when the package they already have is working exactly to the specifications they needed. We have repeated this constantly to our users, that, one version of LibreOffice 3.4 or 3.3.5 ... may be better suited to their needs. If after convincing them of this argument, then forcing everyone through silent updates would be quite contrary to our own advice.
Furthermore, I don't believe I have a single piece of software where updates routines do not have the option to turn "on". This on my Android cellphone, BlackBerry cellphone, Nokia cellphone, BlackBerry Playbook, Mageia Linux systems, 2 windows gamer systems, Wii, Xbox360, Kobo ... as well as the software that are installed on all of these platform. They all have options to turn on/off auto-updates that are decided by the user.
In the face of such a large amount of makers (hardware/software) experience pointing to leaving the choice of auto/manual updates up to the users choice, IMO, we should not push updates to users without giving them the option of turning on/off updates.
I agree that it would be best to try to educate our users as to the benefits of auto-updating. However, I am reminded of silent updates being of a bad decision by the fact that a couple years ago, a virus maker pushed an update to its users when what it really did was turn off their windows systems ... those who were on manual-update were not affected. This even left their corporate clients in a real bind.[1]
I would suggest pushed/silent updates as not a good concept to adopt. We cannot become so arrogant to think that we are never going to make errors in update security, nor should we become so arrogant to think that we know better than the people who use our software. Let's be better than this and show our users how better off they may be with an up-to-date LibreOffice package instead.
Cheers, Marc[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/261165/mcafee_antivirus_update_causes_problems_for_home_and_enterprise_customers.html
-- Marc Paré Marc@MarcPare.com http://www.parEntreprise.com parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF) parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted