All ideas are welcome. Just because the Idea doesn't make it into the product immediately does not make it a bad idea.
At TechEd I made an informal poll during one of the classes and confirmed that having multiple DSP Servers (Environments) is fairly common across our projects. This creates the need to be able to readily identify which Environment you are logging into and are currently working in. This applies to many places across our user experience. Attached below is a powerpoint showing the Technical Architecture in place at the 3M Project, hopefully demonstrating an extreme case with many, many different environments.
Here some places where we may need to identify which environment we are working in:
1. The Login page should have a place to identify the current server you are logging into (see screen below).
2. Generally folks have used COLOR to differentiate instances (RED, BLUE, GREEN, LIGHT BLUE, PURPLE, etc. See the 3M Layout and the colors we used). With 6.1 the color scheme is a user choice, so it's no longer feasible to depend on COLOR to differentiate the instances. We can specify a DEFAULT color style, but the user could override that if desired, so my RED box is WAVE1, and your RED box is WAVE2.
3. The Tabs across of the top of the Browser should show the name of the Environments. It's common to have MANY tabs open at once, and each tab may represent a different Environments. In the past we could modify the <Title> tag in the Virtual.ASPX file to change the displayed name of the application, but that is not ideal and probably no longer supported.
4. When minimized in Windows the names of the tables/apps should be identifiable (not sure if this still applies in Windows 8, it didn't seem to be visible in my Mac).
Essentially we need an easily recognizable way to always know which Environment we are in. The BOA guys may know how to figure that out, but we also need a very easy way to communicate with our Business Users who can easily become confused as they log into all the different environments to support a multi-wave or multi-tier environments. Traditionally we are able to tell a user to log into the DARK GREEN Dev box to check on a report, or look at the LIGHT GREEN load box. This is also how the users communicate back to us when there are problems: "I'm getting an error in the Grey MEE Instance when I click a link..."
As a side note, it's also possible to set a color scheme in SQL Server Management Studio, so a good practice was to synch your colors in SSMS with the same color scheme as CranSoft so your always knew which environment you were writing rules for. Super easy to get confused in SQL Server as well....
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