Discuss Enhancements Opportunity Evaluation

Discuss is a networked electronic conferencing system developed at
MIT.  Besides being used for discussion groups as intended, it has
been used for archiving a variety of text information, such as mailing
lists and OLC logs.  Athena account consultants use a discuss meeting
to manage user requests, and both Lucy and the DCNS Help Desk system
use Discuss as an underlying storage mechanism.

Although new Discuss clients have been developed, there have been no
major changes to the underlying Discuss system for many years.  A
number of desirable features and improvements have been suggested, but
not implemented because of resource constraints.  Some examples of
these features are named transaction flags, rechaining, and faster
transaction listing.  These improvements would increase its usefulness
for archiving, and encourage its use for other purposes.

There exists an opportunity for DCNS to identify and implement a
subset of these suggestions at a reasonable cost.  This task would
involve talking with various Discuss users, such as the Athena
accounts consultants, faculty liaisons, and the OLC, Help Desk and
Lucy developers, to identify the features that they would like added
to Discuss.  We would then determine the cost of these features, and
implement those features that provide the most benefits for a
reasonable cost.  The basic elements of the Discuss architecture would
not be changed.

The next step of this project will be to deliver a requirements
document based on previously submitted suggestions and conversations
with Discuss users.  The requirements document will provide a list of
the desired features, an analysis of their costs and implications, and
recommendations of what to implement.  This requirements document
would take 3 to 4 billable days of Stan Zanarotti's time, over the
course of two to three weeks elapsed time.