Hi everyone,
and welcome to the newest visitors to this forum!
First off, I want to thank everyone who has given feedback on the early test builds. The quality of feedback we received from everyone was excellent!
With a product like this, it takes a lot of time and effort to design and build, and while you can show designs before a product launches, you can't always fully meaningful feedback, until you have something you can put in peoples hands.
I've been most interested in the UI feedback, and there was a lot of unknown going into this release, just how the UI would be accepted. We put a ton of effort into some key areas, but we really did have more design than there was time to build in this first version, and I really wanted to get a raw sense of user feedback without trying to influence it too much. There were some areas I expected users to like less, and was pleased to see that there weren't any big surprises.
Some of the biggest areas you provided feedback on were around workflows and setup. The ultimate goal is to make sure that everything available in the object catalog can be created in-line, wherever you need it. This eliminates any need to visit the object catalog nav menu during any normal setup workflows. Obviously, this isn't fully the case yet, in the first copernicus release, but we're working towards this.
Second, the menu layout is organized so that you would find topics you're looking for easily, though this did mean spreading things out, rather than grouping them strictly by menu topic. In its current form, this can be frustrating, because related items are spread out more than you might expect. What's missing currently, is a section on each page, to present related pages. The idea is, that once you go to a page, links to other related pages will be provided within that page. This will minimize the navigation ping-pong you may feel necessary now, in some cases, and we are planning to add the first version of this related links feature, in a later beta release.
Another component we are still planning to improve, is default settings and objects. For example, initial wireless setup is probably the most frustrating workflow on the product at the moment. We have an ultimate design simplification that we couldn't fully implement in the first copernicus release, but we can greatly simplify the wireless setup, by creating default wireless networks, creating a default wireless network group, and enabling the wireless service by default. This reduces the initial setup of wireless from bouncing between several different pages, to a single screen. With the addition of related links per page, more advanced wireless maintenance also becomes less frustrating. This is just one example, and I look forward to your feedback on it once we can get these changes and more, in your hands.
For now, we'll conclude this initial alpha release, and in just a few minutes, I'll be posting a new thread, with instructions on how to get started on the new beta build. We'll also be opening the forum up to a larger audience of other Sophos partners at this point.
I just want to say thank you from me, and from the whole product management and development teams, for all your great feedback and effort so far. Keep it up!
-Alan Toews
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