James
I was never asked to join the beta. I am pathologically unable to decline
participaiting in betas. I cannot prevent signing non-disclosure agreements, my
hand magically signs them without my willing consent. I've sought counseling.
Believe me, I would have participated.
Now, I
did participate in the switch analyzer beta and had to curtail my efforts there
because of poor timing of code release in conjunction with large work projects
arriving suddenly. If the person still running the beta tests is Mark W, I've
known him for at least 10 years and participated in several NetView ESP's and
betas (mainframe and otherwise), there should be no question I would be
available for beta testing.
I
guess in response to your other question, it boils down to this. I see NetView
evolving and de-evolving all at the same time. It suffers from schizophrenia
driven by "marketing". Now don't get me wrong, the method being used to survey
people and get enhancement requests into the developers hands is valid and
acceptable. But I often wonder about the desire to please everyone all the time.
This feature was not ready. It has all the earmarks. Documented features that
aren't there, confusion in support over what the feature is supposed to do, and
the inability of level 3 to provide a spec that I can code the status
application against - the programmers can't tell me how to write code to
interface with it. C'mon.
And
frustration, anger, disappointment are all the result of a simple response from
level 3-- they said "no" to something that black letters on white paper said
should be there. At some point in time, software companies become accountable.
If it were a car, or a washing machine, or a child's toy, it would NOT be
acceptable to say the product does something it does not. But in the software
industry liberties are taken through oversight, lack of planning and poor
judgment. My anger is not so much as an individual programmer as it is at an
organization that from time to time demonstrates that if they had 4 arms, the
would not be able to find a left one.
Jane, and Scott,
Help me out here, folks. I
don't want to upset anyone nor rub salt into a wound, but I am very
puzzled.
Both of you, Jane and
Scott, have expressed extreme disappointment over what was provided as new
function in NetView 7.1.4.
I'm
sorry about that. I'll grant you that the new function is not much.
But I'm mystified as to why you thought there would be so much more.
This is just another NetView point release. Most of what got in
there was to support new events going to TEC. Now that NetView is a
component of TEC, that is it's primary job, so far as Tivoli upper management
is concerned. I think that NetView development may have wished to
provide more, but they have to negotiate for every extra day to code something
new that isn't mandated by a TEC requirement.
So I've asked the question internally why you were both
not included in the 7.1.4 beta, so that two of our most valuable and vocal
users could have previewed the function, and provided vital feedback to
development. I was stunned to be told that both of you were
offered the opportunity to participate and that both of you turned it down!
Is this true? Can you share
with us why?
That would
have been the ideal method for you to avoided all this surprise and
disappointment. And your comments, likes and dislikes, would have gone
all the way up the chain beyond NetView development and TEC development to the
folks who control the entire Tivoli marketing strategy. You could have
obtained a commitment from development as to when your full needs would be
met.
Why didn't you grab
it?
James Shanks Level
3 Support for Tivoli NetView for UNIX and Windows Tivoli Software /
IBM Software Group
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