The story behind Chapter 1

When I joined the DPM group, I started off digging through the specs to learn about the product and I discovered a wonderful document called "Master Scenarios". What this document did was tell the story of a fictional customer and DPM.

I had read other content on DPM before this, marketing materials and Help-in-progress and such, and from those I'd begun to grasp how parts of DPM worked and formed a fuzzy idea of how it was intended to fit into a business solution. But it wasn't until I read "Master Scenarios" that the light bulb came on.

In this story, a make-believe company decides to use DPM, and then a make-believe administrator -- we'll call him Joe -- deploys and manages it. "Master Scenarios" details each decision Joe might make and each task he might perform, describes how the product will perform and how Joe will interact with it. For instance, "Joe selects the Reporting tab. Because Joe has not configured reporting for DPM yet, he sees a dialog box for configuring the credentials for reporting." (I'm rephrasing from memory, btw.)

The document is a long story, since the goal is to capture the entire experience of using DPM, and it provides a framework and vision for the development of the product itself. For me, it brought all of the features together into a coherent framework. I still had all the technical details to learn, but because of the "Master Scenarios", I would then be able to place those details in their proper context and understand their relationships to the user experience.

If you've read Chapter 1 of the DPM Operations Guide, you figured out where it came from several paragraphs ago. It's a condensed version of the "Master Scenarios" approach, telling the story of what Joe goes through in administering and supporting DPM. The intent is to create a framework of expectations to encompass the detailed information in the rest of the Ops Guide. Hopefully, customers will find it useful. (No complaints yet, which is a good sign...)