The Importance of Product Metrics and Privacy
Product metrics are incredibly important for any software developer, and the value they can add to customers. Through the use of properly captured product metrics, the developer can target specific customer use cases, and identify problems within the software that were not previously identified. Proper use of the data can also help to identify product flow issues and performance problems.
It is important to target the right product data and collect no more than is needed to get the job done. Cireson has moved towards collecting specific product usage information on how our customers use their portals. There is an option to not provide this data, but every customer that contributes would be moving us closer to a better understanding of their product needs.Â
Information on what data is are collected and how to opt-out is included below.
What's Collected
There is unique information that we need to collect to make the other data relevant, but we also don't want to collect information that can identify the individual user or their personal information. With this in mind we are focusing only on collecting the following information:
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Additional information collected includes:
User ID: This is a GUID applied by the system, and while it may link back to other customer information elsewhere in the customer system, the ID is unique to a user and does not contain or link to the individual user's personal information in any way that is accessible to Cireson.
AD Domain: This is the internal domain identifier for the customer but contains only the name and no other information. This is a unique identifier between customers that is not sensitive and allows us to understand which company the specific usage information relates to. It does not help us to identify users individually or provide us with any personal information.
Other Information: We also collect and identify the portal specific roles a user has, to determine what functionality a given role most utilizes. We include the language information to help determine how different locales may utilize the portal in unique ways or unique issues they may experience.
Opting-Out
Should a customer’s administration team determine that they do not want to share this information with Cireson, they can easily opt-out of metrics collection by either unchecking the box during installation, or at any time after installation in the Product Metrics administrative settings.
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Building a Better Product
Through the use of this new information, we will be able to focus our development on improvements to the features and areas that our customers utilize the most. We focus a lot of our energies on what comes out of the community and conversations with our customers. Product metrics will allow us to reach more of our customer base, and understand how we can be more effective in our development efforts.
Thank you for sharing product metric data with us, and helping to make our products better.