Code Deploy Tools for Customers
We have roughly 50 Enterprise customers on private clusters. This means 50 customers who have the possibility (depending on their contract) of using Vanilla's Code Deploy feature. This allows our customers to develop and maintain their own themes, and in some rare cases, plugins.
A pain point in the CSM team is helping our customers through the process of setting up their local environments and getting started with Code Deploy. As CSMs we know a lot, but setting up a local environment is not one of those things, so we're always flying blind, and thus we need to rely on developers to help fill in the blanks.
- Setting up local environments on Windows: For Mac users, we thankfully have Vanilla Docker to fall back on, but for Windows users, we have nothing but old support tickets and emails, and Lincoln and his team to rely on.
- Code Deploy Philosophy/Process: As for helping customers understand our process, we now have the Developer Services Docs, which is a huge help.
- Best practices for Vanilla Developers: While our customers may have skilled devs on their teams, most of them want Vanilla docs, recommendations and pointers to get them started. We can often scrounge together a list of docs that can help, but it's always with a word of caution that our dev docs are geared towards our OSS users.
The next things we would need to work on would likely be:
- Docker for Windows, or docs on how to set up a local environment on windows
- A type of "Vanilla Development" KB Guide to help new dev teams get started.
The goal here is to reduce the amount of support generated by Code Deploy users, and improve the onboarding experience for new customers and dev teams.
Comments
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Some of my customers using or planning on using Code Deploy:
- Zapier
- Asus
- SEI
- College Confidential
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Happy to be a Ginuea pig if you need to test out the documents and resources. Need to go through Code Deploy myself anyway. I can test it on all platforms - Windows, Mac or Linux.
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As as windows installations goes we would need to agree on what a windows installation means. There's quite a couple options.
- Install directly on windows. This works on all windows versions, but it is complex to setup, and will like not be very consistent. Likely lots of assistance required for customers w/ incorrect setups (like with Acer). Very manual.
- Docker for Windows. This would be similar to our Mac setup. It requires Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, or Education though. Very similar to what our developers use.
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Some of my customers using or planning on using:
- Smartsheet
- Equinox
- Opentext
- Tomtom
- Acer
- HMD Global (Nokia)
- Qualtrics
- Oculus
- Tripwire
- Tesla
Painpoints:
- when a user needs tech support setting up their local, there is no documented process, it's currently ad hoc support
- when a user needs tech support for a custom addon or custom theme dev, here is no documented process, it's currently ad hoc support
- a lot of the time the conversation happens in the customers slack room, it might make sense to have a dedicated repo (doing it in the customers own repo means they see eveything which is not always ideal and often results in them tagging random devs which is not ideal for sprint planning etc
- being able to set the expectation with the client as to timeline for these types of support requests would be ideal as enterprise deals tend to have very quick launch timelines these days and it might make sense to ensure everyone is on the same page
- having a doc about what addons are not available on local (such as subcommunities) and some tips on getting around that would be awesome
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when a user needs tech support setting up their local, there is no documented process, it's currently ad hoc support.
This is both a process and a documentation problem. The actual installation process is a lot more difficult than I wish it was, and it's actually gotten more complex in the past year. This is an area that is important for us to tackle as we grow developers, as well as for our enterprise clients.
having a doc about what addons are not available on local (such as subcommunities) and some tips on getting around that would be awesome
This is largely a technical problem. What we really need is some core some core interface for subcommunties, with a proprietary implementation and a "stub" implementation. This is what we do configuration/caching/various infrastructure hooks.
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From my perspective, the biggest thing is a lack of a centralized process, whether it's to put it in the customers repo (where they can see it and things dont go through the csm-niceness filter), in the estimates repo (where they eff up stats), or in the customers slack channel (chaos). Finding a spot for these to go I think would be a great first step as the volume ramps up IMHO.
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