Hi Wendy, great feedback, thanks for taking the time to document these issues for us!
Let me try to quickly address each of your suggestions:
1) The current integration between the portal and the Cisco account is a one-way hash validation of the password only, the portal doesn't currently have access to any other information about the Cisco account, including any email addresses associated with it. So today, the portal needs to collect the Contact Info so that it can set up a default contact (in the portal), which is then used by the portal as a target for a default notification rule. Possibly in the future we can avoid this entering of redundant information via further integration between the portal and Cisco's account databases.
2,3,4) Great catches, we'll look at getting these fixed.
5) Don't think there is much we can do to code around add-ons or extensions that potentially alter the code that we are sending to the browser. Our efforts here will probably be to quantify the add-ons that tend to break the portal's usability and make use of that information while providing problem assistance to portal users. This one is a great candidate for an online troubleshooting recommendation.
6) I don't believe that any computer operating on a local area network and receiving IP resources (routing/transit) from that network can reasonably have any expectation of privacy of it's existence from the other hosts on that network. A functioning local-area network pretty much requires that hosts annouce themselves to each other when joining the LAN, so that systems are able to communicate properly with each other. VARs supporting small business networks may need to know about all hosts on the network, in order to troubleshoot potential network resource conflicts. I know that the feature to hide network devices on the portal has been requested previously and that we are currently evaluating this feature, but it has some pretty far-reaching impacts. How do you get those items back if you need to see them again? How do you display the network topology when a parent device has been hidden?
As a general question to you and the community, what personal data do you consider might be too personal to share with the portal and might need to be suppressed? For example, I know that TBA has the capabilty of detecting SMB/CIFS shares from individual workstations, but we currently don't enable this feature. This is an area where we need help from the trial partipants to tell us how much data is enough to provide them with the tools they need to help their customers, without becoming percieved as 'big-brother'.
-mike
