Under Community Review

Allow groups of mixed object types to have their statuses updated together from the Baseline tab

When I'm trying to move all of the contents of a baseline from whatever their current workflow state is into a "released" workflow state I should be able to click/select objects of multiple different object types and change them all at once. As it stands, I can only group objects of the same type. This makes no sense; there is no scenario where it's reasonable to be able to multi-select and advance a group of topics or maps or tasks but not the other resources used by them.

Jeff Hooker
  • in reply to Dave De Meyer

    If the objects have different workflow which would block them from being acted upon as a group, then being able to sort on "shared workflow" would address this.

    /rant

    The absence of this kind of action is something that I used to pillory for the vendor for my last CCMS over, because it's rooted it what I refer to as a "small data mindset". Problems like this aren't obvious when you're working with the kind of tiny sample data sets that salesmen use to demo their products, or QA teams use to smoke test for basic functionality, but try working on a document containing thousands of resources which need to be acted upon as a group and see if your blood pressure stays stable. It's legitimately infuriating unless you're happy just spending a whole morning repeatedly pointing, clicking, and waiting. 

    While we're on the subject, here's two other "small data mindset" samples:

    1. Drop-down lists that look great with 4 or 5 entries, but which will have dozens/hundreds when actually deployed in the field. Utterly unrealistic from a usability standpoint.

    2. Grid pages (like the baseline tab which can contain thousands of entries) which can be sorted but not filtered. 

    The thing the really gets me about basic usability issues like this is that they effectively punish the people who are using your product in a way that makes your product worth its cost; the larger/more complex the deployment, the worse the user experience, and not on a linear growth path, but somewhere between cubic and exponential. Basically, as people exercise the features which make SDL worth the investment, the user experience gets worse faster than the return on investment grows. Complex tasks often require complex GUI, but aspects of SDL make simple tasks complex and complex tasks more complex. That's just wrong.

    rant/

    Ok, signing off before I get into the SDL "image update" process, from which there will be no recovery. Thanks for listening Slight smile

  • How do you see this working if the object types have different workflow assigned among libraries, topics and maps?