Issues with channelAustin Staff OM Project Demo

I did a OM Project demo this morning (May 11, 2009) for 8 channelAustin staff members. I had a few problems that would be good to resolve for when I have to do another demo, which should be soon. I'm posting them here so that others can see what issues I had and so we all can understand the solution. If you are doing demos while your site is still development, you may run across this.

Here are some of things we ran into.

1) Unblocking members didn't work.

We have hundreds of user accounts on our development site. These were imported from our existing records. And these accounts are all blocked. In order for anyone to participate in the demo, their user accounts need to be unblocked. The choice was to either unblock all accounts, or to search for the specific user names and unblock those. The unblock would have been temporary.

I had some trouble with this. Under Administer / User Management, I can do a filter for all blocked users, but there does not appear to be a way to Select all blocked users in order to then choose the Update option for unblocking all of them. In addition, with so many user accounts, it is very hard to search through the entire list to find particular user names. It's possible, but I did not have time for this.

With a group of staff members sitting there watching me try to figure this out, my quick solution was let them sign in under the user accounts of a few other staff members whose names were near the top of the list. For this I also had to change the passwords. (I was logged in as administrator). This was a quick and dirty way to doing this. It did allow them to log in and have access to the development site, and it worked with staff, but I wouldn't want to use this same method.

So for my next demo with producers, I need a way to do this. I know that I can search for specific users with CiviCRM. I wonder if this is how I should have approached it. Yet I'm curious why User Management doesn't have a Select all feature or a search feature. Or does it and I'm not looking in the right place?

2) Access to Project required setting role for user to admin.

One of the first things I did was demonstrate the Project feature. I had created a Project for this purpose, but while I was doing this I decided to use a Project called Creative Commons that had been set up when DOM staff were here. I was logged in as administrator. I went to the Creative Commons project and added the other users who were in the room. Right after I did that at two of the work stations they were able to see the Creative Commons project on the list, but at two others they weren't. So I looked at the Administer / User Management and saw that the two who could see the Creative Commons had admin roles (plus member roles). So I gave admin roles to the other two accounts, and when I did that all work stations had access to Creative Commons.

I'm wondering if because I was logged in as user number 1 that it was requiring the admin role for the others, or because when the Creative Commons project was created it was done so under an admin role.

3) On Create Reservation, people can choose to reserve an item before checking availability.

In the demo, the Create Reservation form (MERCI) worked well. People were able to choose dates and choose available equipment and save and see the reservations. There was one case where the person selected an item from the Reserve item #1 field without first clicking on Check availability after selecting a date range. The clicking on the save button didn't do anything other than cause it to stall.

It seems that the Reserve item 1, or , or 3, etc. options should not be viewable until Check Availability is submitted . . . or if Save is submitted without first having clicked on Check Availability, then an error message would appear. In the case today, there was no error message.

4) On Create Reservation, the term "Audience" is confusing

At a glance, it's not clear why the list under Create Reservation with the heading Audience exists. At closer look, it is a list of projects. But it's not clear why someone would select one of these options while making a reservation. On our site it looks like the names of all projects are appearing in the list, even those that have expired years ago. I told staff to just ignore this. It'd be good to know what the purpose of this is, and whether it is really needed. I can't see the need.

5) Making reservations on project managed by someone else.

A question came up as to whether any member of a Project can make reservations under that Project, because this appeared to be the case. Since we all had admin roles, I'm guessing that is why we were able to do this. But I'm not sure.

6) On profiles the Skill section did not appear

One minor issue was that when we looked at the Profile section, we could not see any of the content under the Skills section. People tried to edit the networking feature by adding Need or Offer, but after saving these did not appear.

I'm going to submit the few items above related to MERCI (reservation) to the issues area for MERCI.