Last Week’s Mix Updates

As Rich and Anthony follow a weekly deployment schedule, I’m still finding myself challenged to report the updates they’ve made. Throw in a holiday yesterday, and we’re almost on the eve of this week’s fixes.

Anyway, here are the most recent updates to Mix. Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs to us with the feedback form or who has suggested an idea about how to improve Mix.

• We’ve solved the mysterious Null! Null! profile issue. Older oracle.com accounts did not require a first and last name upon creation, so when someone with one of these older accounts logs into Mix, we can’t pull the name values into the new Mix profile. We use Null! Null! as the default values, but since many accounts exist with this name, saving changes was problematic. From now on, first and last name are required for a new Mix profile, which should help clear up the issue. For Null! Null! accounts already registered in Mix, we’ll be reminding these people to update their profiles.
• Early on, it was suggested that we make it easier to cultivate groups by allowing members of public groups to invite their colleagues and friends. Now, this is possible; just navigate to a public group to which you belong, and you’ll notice a new link in the group header called “Invite Others to Group”. For example, if you’re a member of the Oracle Mix group, click on over and check out the new invite link.
• Another early suggestion about how to spread groups was that we make it easier to join public groups. So, we added a small “Join Group” link next to each public group, directly to the right of the link showing the number of members in the group (another implemented idea). The “Join Group” link only shows for public groups that you don’t already belong to, so to see it in action, on the Groups home, scroll down below the list of groups that you’re in and my guess is you’ll see it there for at least one group.
• Thanks to notes from Mix users, we’ve added to the product list. There is now an Advanced Procurement product category under E-Business Suite. You’ll find Purchasing among other products within that category, and under PeopleSoft Enterprise, Financial Management, we completed the list of modules. FYI, if you’re stuck and can’t find something, we used the product taxonomy listed on oracle.com as our basis. So, chances are, if you can find it on oracle.com, it’s in the same structure in Mix.
• We fixed a couple nasty UI bugs on IE6, and the comments on ideas in IE6 and IE7 now show to the right of the avatar and timestamp, like they do in other browsers.
• The anything tagged with page is now working, e.g. this page shows any object in Mix tagged with “mix”. The objects are listed individually to the right, and the Anything page shows in that same area when you’re not looking at it, of course.
• The week before last, we fixed an issue with idea pagination that was generating raw HTML. We missed the idea view within Groups, which was astutely caught by an Oracle person, and it’s now fixed.
• The members of a group are now ordered by name; as an example, check out Justin’s OTN group membership.
• We fixed an issue affecting groups with long names, e.g. Paul’s Enterprise 2.0 Practitioners group. The group name was overlapping functions for the group, like invite and edit (for owners). Not anymore.
• The Q&A UI is consistent with the other objects, i.e. the big red box performs a search on what you enter, instead of automatically creating a question. This will prevent keyword searches from creating questions like this one and this one.
• And finally, Rich added help bubbles to ideas and profile forms to give you more information about what to enter. He’s also added red asterisks to the profile page to denote required fields.