All,
today I'll give some feedback about experiences that the
legendary "Joe the plumber" gets wie SIP Communicator.
Well, Joe has a nice Laptop that uses Windows XP Professional
and he likes to install the great SIP Communicator to reduce
his communications costs and stay in contact with others. Thus
he downloaded the latest Windows build from SC's download
page, stores the file, performs a double click on the file.
Voila, the installation starts. After clicking to continue,
several times, accepted the license, then seeing a strange
message from a thing called "Firewall" that asks him if he
likes to open the firewall for J2SE - Joe agrees to do so.
Installation succeeds - that was easy. Joe starts SC and SC
greets Joe with a nice screen that presents some ways to
register. Because Joe is a forward looking man he already
created a SIP account at iptel.org 
. He enters his account
name and password, clicks Next and ------ SC reports an
error telling Joe that the regsitration to iptel.org failed.
Just this - not more, no detailed reason, no hint where to
look further (for example to check a log file or such).
Joe is unhappy 
.
Dear all, this is a real story that happened to my neighbour
when he tried to install SC on XP (and Windows 7) on systems
that never had SC before. He called me and we checked several
things:
- disable firewall and retried, no success, he uses a standard
DSL connection via a router, thus NAT is active, but this
should not be a problem with iptel.org?
- no logfile was available (log directory was not created)
because the Desktop link points to "run.exe" and not to
"run.bat" - the latter one creates the log directory
- started via "run.bat", now we have a log directory, but no
log file - there is no button or GUI element to enable
logging (only packet logging - but that didn't output anything)
- the error message does not give any details why/what failed,
network problem? wrong name passowrd? just plain "does not work"
- Side info:
Sound was set to Javasound, no other sound system was offered -
I thought we have portaudio as well also on windows?
Video: no camera offered but there was a USB camera plugged in
and for example VLC can work with it.
Due to time contraints I couldn't enable logging (didn't even
check if log4j.properties file is available and editable) to get
more info.
This shows me that we need to do someting on the usability and
"ease of use" before we implement new features, new fancy stuff,
new protocols, etc etc. IMHO we need to really concentrate to
make SC usable by "Joe the plumber":
- easy installation (mainly solved, but check if installation sets
environment correctly)
- a procedure that performs some "take the user by the hand" for the
first steps until registration is done and successful, reporting if
problems show up and to give hints how to solve them
- can we do something like this: enable logging and have a simple log
viewer or a hint how to check the logs
Any other ideas ?
Best regards,
Werner
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. He enters his account