Training in a Safe Sandbox

In a perfect world, in which all users are technically adept and completely comfortable with mastering new software and new ways of working, your job would now be done. After all, they installed the program and connected to your site. What more could they need? Training, for one thing. For many, the idea that they can edit and publish their own Web pages will be completely newand also a little scary. For probably the first time, your new users are being handed the power to post information where everyone in the company or in the world can see it. It can be a little overwhelming.

One sure way for users to overcome this fear is to practice. Unfortunately, public-facing Web sites or even companywide intranets don't allow much room to learn by trial and error. In addition, administrators and managers are often reluctant to let untrained content contributors loose on a Web site for fear of the undesirable changes they might accidentally make. The solution for both users and administrators is to implement a private area on the Web for training purposes. In software development, such an area is referred to as a sandboxwhere it's safe to make mistakes and learn.

There are several ways to implement a safe training environment:

• If the learning is to take place in a training facility, the most straightforward approach is to have all the systems use connections pointing to a duplicate of the site, hosted on a staging or other nonproduction server. In this scenario, only one connectionto the training siteis needed.

• New users are often in a diverse learning environment, perhaps seated at desks that are spread throughout the organization. In this situation, it's more practical to set up a separate connection to a training site. Ideally, the users would start working with the training connection and graduate to working on the actual site when they're ready. With multiple connections, you should consider labeling all pages in the training site so that they are clearly differentiated (an SSI header could be used for this purpose). Or if there is a logo common to all the pages, such as the Bounty General JPEG, the term "Training" could be graphically inserted into a single file.

  

• Some administrators prefer not to use multiple connections for fear that it will be too confusing. In this case, users can practice editing actual pages on your site by creating a new page based on an existing one. Make sure that this option (located in the New Pages category of the Edit Role Settings dialog box) is enabled for the role in training. New pages should be stored with a unique identifier such as the user name or telephone extension (so the file goinghome.htm becomes goinghome_jlowery.htm).

No matter which route you take, the most important strategy is to develop training material that resembles your actual working environment as closely as possible. Not only does this technique provide users with a simulation that they can more easily apply when they're doing it for real, but it also raises their comfort level by letting them experience firsthand what it's like to work on an actual site.