Mozilla Messaging, Thunderbird and other fun stuff!
Mozilla community contributor, fuzzyfox, has created a very nice screencast that explains the Quick Filter Toolbar in Thunderbird 3. Check it out!
Got your own screencast that explains Thunderbird? Or do you have favourite one that explains Thunderbird? Then let me know in the comments and I’ll post about the best ones here.
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– August 10, 2010
Even though SuMoMo doesn’t yet have a real localization dashboard (we’re working on it in bug 549407) and hasn’t been announced in the localization news groups, many folks have contributed to SuMoMo (check out the full list of SuMoMo contributors as of July 20th, 2010).
This is just a quick blog post to say thanks! And an official post on the l10n news groups is coming soon. Thanks to all localizers for their patience with the delay.
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– July 27, 2010
I think this applies to all of the Mozilla Communities. Not just Thunderbird’s communities and not just the support communities. Thanks to Ludo for taking this photo at the Mozilla Summit a few weeks ago in Whistler.
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– July 21, 2010
Due to Mozilla Summit Schedule changes SuMoMo meeting to 17:45 (from 17:15) and Support and QA meeting canceled. Meet in the lobby, look for Roland (Canadian of Filipino heritage) in an Orange hoody. Full SuMoMo meeting details on the wiki.
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– July 7, 2010
A large number of Mozilla Staff including myself and a large number of Mozilla community contributors will be in Whistler this week from Tuesday afternoon or so to Saturday (I arrive early Tuesday afternoon and then have to leave early Thursday night). We’re going to take advantage of this to have further meetings that I alluded to in my previous post about MozillaZine.
The two meetings are:
The times and place of the meetings are TENTATIVE. Stay tuned to the Summit informal meeting wiki page for last minute details or email me roland AT mozillamessaging.com or rolandtanglao on irc in #moz10.
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– July 5, 2010
To inform the community and in light of upcoming other community meetings at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, we met with Eric Moore and Joe Sabash of MozillaZine, Mozilla’s earliest (and one of the biggest) support community to discuss how we can work together better. This is part of a broader goal at Mozilla Messaging to find ways to support community members more effectively.
Why start with MozillaZine? They are one of the oldest and biggest support communities. Our goal is to repeat the process with each of the non English speaking Thunderbird support communities and then set up something ongoing so this is not a one off event. We hope to have a follow-up meeting with MozillaZine in late July or early August and continue doing so with them and other communities that are supporting Thunderbird in all languages on a regular basis.
Eric wrote an account of the meeting on MozillaZine:
QUOTE
It started off with Joe and myself talking about MozillaZine’s concerns and interests.
- We explained why (without dredging up a lot of history) we are so sensitive about how easy it is for a typical user to find a link to us on the Mozilla Messaging web site .
- We want to be more than a secondary support channel, and are looking for ways to collaborate.
- Our puzzlement that Mozilla Messaging didn’t seem to view our success as helping them.
- Concern that users provided feedback in public documents such as the Thunderbird 3 planning document yet the documents don’t seem to get updated. The issue isn’t the chances of anybody’s suggestion being followed, its that the document doesn’t seem to get updated based on anybodies suggestions.
We suggested some areas to collaborate:
- Both groups seem reluctant to point users to threads on the other groups forum when the information isn’t available in their own forum.
- Gather feedback from testers (Thunderbird Builds forum) for alpha/beta tests.
- It would help if somebody (such as Roland) occasionally browsed the Thunderbird Builds forum to see if there is somethign critical that you might want to know, or to share information. We’re not talking about supporting users/testers, just gathering and sharing information.
- Share some information with our community. For example, the developers looking for feedback on the Quick Filter and a new version of the Migration Assistant. Having the user provide feedback in the GetSatisfaction forum is not a problem.
- Better ties with QA
END QUOTE
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– July 5, 2010
Time flies when you are having fun! The Thunderbird Knowledge Base at support.mozillamessaging.com codenamed “SuMoMo” launched back in early January but I keep forgetting to blog about it. We have some great English and Spanish content (thanks to Guillermo López Leal, and Pedro Garcia Rodriguez!) with more to come soon (French and German are next probably). Of course you can help out in your language as I blogged about before. Writing knowledge base articles is easy; it’s fun and it’s an easy way to establish yourself in the Thunderbird community.
Finally “SuMoMo” has many meanings in various languages one of which in Japanese is plum hence the fun picture from flickr user uguisu. And of course if you have any questions about SuMoMo, please leave a comment here or email me, roland AT mozillamessaging.com
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– May 18, 2010
Since Thunderbird 3.0 shipped last week, our community support traffic has increased dramatically. We have roughly three times the number of support topics as well as 15 times the amount of traffic. Needless to say we need help!
Do you use Thunderbird? Always wanted to contribute to a open source project but don’t know how? But you love explaining things and helping others? Then helping our community support Thunderbird is a great way to start.
You don’t have to be a coder or be “technical”. Just somebody uses Thunderbird and wants to help other Thunderbird users.
Here’s how to start:
i.e. help where you can by replying to support topics, and by tagging,Questions? Need help on using Get Satisfaction and providing Thunderbird community support? Email me: roland AT mozillamessaging.com or ask myself (I am generally on there M-F 10am.-5p.m Pacific) and the other folks on the IRC chat channel #gsfn on irc.mozilla.org
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– December 17, 2009
The Thunderbird 3.0 release is just around the proverbial corner. And we’d like to release the SUMO knowledge base for Mozilla Messaging, support.mozillamessaging.com, code-named “SuMoMo” (initially only Thunderbird of course since Raindrop is still in its early days) at about the same time as Thunderbird 3.0.
SuMoMo is currently in beta preview mode on our staging server and currently has the Firefox look and feel but we are in the process of theming it to look like the rest of the Mozilla Messaging web presence. Theming should complete in a few days.
The last thing to do before release is to add knowledge aka “content”, in English (of course you can contribute English plus other languages but for the first release we’d like to do English as the first priority). This is one of the easiest ways to contribute for people who are not software developers (other than helping out Ludo and the QA team).
No software development experience required! We just need people who are using Thunderbird and can write regardless of whether they are developers or not. SuMoMo is for users not developers. Developers have lots of other places for their documentation e.g. Mozilla Development Center, etc
Interested? Want to help?
Here’s how (don’t worry if you don’t know how to use Bugzilla email roland AT mozillamessaging.com or if you are IRC savvy ping me Monday-Friday 10-5p.m. Pacific on irc.mozilla.org, #maildev, my userid is rolandtanglao and I’ll get you up and running in no time):
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– November 30, 2009
After two and a half months on the job and in the process getting immersed in Mozilla Messaging’s initial implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird community support, it’s time for some reflection.
At Bryght and Raincity where we used Get Satisfaction sparingly, I had a vague sense of happiness with it but it’s only until you actually use something extensively as I have, given the veritable “flood” of Thunderbird support, do you have a sense of how it really works and how it works well:
Of course nothing is perfect, I (and others) have lots of suggestions (e.g. APIs for Last Employee and comments) for improvement some of which I have filed with Get Satisfaction in Get Satisfaction of course and more to be documented soon.
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– September 30, 2009
