Support/Kitsune/Thunderbird-integration

Purpose

• Reduce the maintenance costs of the two installations of SUMO for Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Reducing user confusion since search from the start page currently only shows Firefox results.

Outcome

• One installation with one database, a unified search.

Open issues/risks

• Very high effort for only one product, probably only makes sense to go this way once we have to support more products.
• How feasible is moving over articles from SUMOMO, including images and templates
  • seems very doable, based on documentation and a chat between developers: the changes between SUMO and SUMOMO are documented here
• bug 754439 is a bug to create a SuMoMo database dump so that a more detailed investigation can be done

Definition

Feature overview

The integration of TB articles into SUMO is a major tasks that requires us to upgrade our software to handle more than just one product.

The UX research work did already lay down the foundation for the parts that are browsable in the KB. Once the product based navigation lands we would be able to support more products in our KB.

An area that needs to accommodate more products still is the search results page. Faceted search would allow users to drill down on a certain product while still allowing us to use one unified source for results.

The non-user facing part of supporting more than one product is mainly focused on the various dashboards that tell our contributors what they should be doing next and that tell us how we are doing in general.

In addition the user to user support would need to be extended to hold more than one product without being confusing to users or contributors (including the way people ask questions)

While the above covers the improvements on the SUMO side we'd also need to lay down the rules for migrating articles and media (and possibly user accounts) to SUMO. From our last experience of migration we know that this is a particularly messy subject that needs careful planning.

Users & use cases

Dependencies

Requirements

• Dashboards that are browsable by product.
  • KB dashboard
  • L10n dashboard
  • KPI dashboard
  • Karma dashboard
• KB article discussions overview that works for separate products
• Faceted search to distinguish between products
• Forums that are browsable by product
• Showfor support for Thunderbird - perhaps as easy as productizing :sancus's showfor thunderbird modifications that are currently working on SuMoMo

SuMoMo Migration

Sancus has agreed informally to help do the migration in Q1 2014. We'll verify that once we get closer to the date!

NB - Migrations are messy and imperfect so we'll do our best in code and the rest will be done by humans before going live if possible! (not going to migrate Get Satisfaction Data, GS migration if any belongs to a future phase TBD; for this phase GS forums may continue to exist unchanged)

• Articles, Images, Videos
  • Articles:
    • History, Ideally: migrate the whole article with history and match users with existing SUMO users or create them
    • History, Fallback: Only migrate the latest revision. Provide a list of users who have contributed to an article - :sancus to write a script to add the users to the contribution field (or if that's not possible we can use a keyboard automation utility to drive firefox to do this manually)
    • Title - if the title is identical to existing SuMo article title then add "Thunderbird" to the end of the title and if possible tag or keyword it thunderbird ; SUMO developers to provide a list of naming collisions so that Roland can manually double check this
    • Other Metadata - keywords, etc: just bring over unchanged if possible, if not delete it during migration Please do not migrate other metadata please (of course keep a backup)
  • Images, Videos: Migrate and if there is a collision, add "thunderbird" to the name. Provide a list of the collisions for manual repair post migration
  • showfor - if there are any articles with pre tb 17 showfor, please provide a list and Roland will correct manually post migration
• Users - only migrate users that have edited articles. If we go with fallback, Please don't migrate any users.
• KB Article Forum content - don't migrate

Non-Goals

Design

Functional Spec

What contributors should do

Things that will need to be figured out

User experience design

Implementation plan

We can do a move in 2 phases:

• 1st phase:
  • offer contributor dashboards separated by product
  • offer faceted search
  • Move over articles

• 2nd phase:
  • offer user to user support for more than one product

Standard Rationale

(so that Thunderbird KB integration follows the same format as all other features)

Title

Integrate the Thunderbird Knowledge Base into the SUMO Knowledge Base

Problem Statement / Description

Users only see one Mozilla and are confused by the fact that the Thunderbird Knowledge Base and Support Forums are not integrated with Firefox and vice-versa. This was confirmed by Susan's IA user study.

Measureable Outcome

• Reduced user confusion
• More contributors since this means we will have single sign-on for the Knowledge Base (instead of 2 today) and therefore Thunderbird contributors will be able to cross-over into Firefox seamlessly and vice-versa

Solutions

Integrate Thunderbird KB into SUMO as described by the remainder of this wiki page; any other solution is non elegant and long term leads to more developer effort.