The idea has been laid out, at my current project, to do away with having separate Production and Development report suites and just dump everything into a single Global suite that the organization would then simply have to segment out between whether they wanted Development or Production traffic. Reasoning; They are tired of having to keep track of which plugin to use, they sometimes forget to switch the plugin when pushing from Dev to Prod and they say it will be easier for THEM to maintain.
My take: The idea is borderline lunacy. You don't co-mingle Dev and Production traffic in a single suite UNLESS said suite is to be used exclusively by advanced users who know enough to segment out what they are looking for and even then the reasoning is sketchy. To the lay person coming in and using the tool, they are not going to know all of the proper ways to filter. Its a recipe for alot of bad reporting. In all my now 17 years in web analytics and work with Fortune 500s have I ever seen an organization even consider this as the default suite for all users. But this is what you get when you have a technical team making decisions for a business tool, it would seem.
I can write something up all day long on the pitfalls of doing this, but would like corroborating documentation to reference. Probably because it is such a basic no-no, I am unable to find anything specific to this. Kind of like how I cannot find documentation on why it is not a good idea to stop breathing. Its just common sense.
