Eating one’s own dogfood—with the customer

Dave continues to explore the joys of getting Userland’s flagship workgroup blogging solution, Manila, up and functional at Harvard. Today’s story captures him learning about a potential conflict between Frontier’s built-in web server and Microsoft IIS, if both are running on the same box.

This is exactly the sort of thing that more software developers, and CEOs, should do—get out into the wild, outside the company IT environment, on the other coast or in another part of the world, and try to install and operate your product. Does it work like you expected? Uh oh, it doesn’t! Have you documented the problem? Is it a bug or a compatibility issue? Has anyone else had the same problem? Is your website any help? Kudos to Dave for using his new job as a way to improve Userland’s products and support.