James, as always, you provide an answer based on your own comittment to the 
success of this forum. Please do not confuse my input here as any kind of a 
negative view of your help here. You are the best.

NOW, with that having been said I am going to respond, again, to the some of 
points you raise.

===> This list is about NetView usage, period.  It is not a marketing channel, 
no matter how much you would like it to be one.  It has no official standing 
within the company.  And no opinion here is official, especially not mine.  I 
thought that was clear a long time ago.  We are contributing to the NetView 
users' group, nothing more.

James, that is the whole point. This needs to be an official forum or at the 
very least, an unofficial forum that internal marketing and development staff 
review and participate. There are NUMEROUS problems with the marketing and 
sales aspects of these product(s) that are severely inhibiting technical 
advancement. One of those problems is the inability to actually get the 
technical data I need to fulfill an objective. Which product? What version? 
What release? What are the interoperability options? What are the technical 
criteria for deployment decisions? What decisions make technical sense? What 
decisions make financial sense? What are the alternative products? 

People reach out here on peripheral questions because very few of us run 
NetView in a vaccuum and none of us can claim to really *KNOW* which 
products/features are in which Tivoli product (or any of those other 
questions). Even Jane Curry and Bill Evans who in my mind have the most 
extensive product suite knowledge of anyone on this forum find themselves 
stumped with product announcements like the NetView 7.1.2 announcement.

Not a Tivoli supported forum? Why not? Give me a good reason why this should 
not be an official forum? You have internal support staff from Tivoli 
maintaining the mailing list! You have Tivoli employees replying to forum 
questions. 

===> I will grant you that there is not nearly enough detail in the recent 
marketing announcements, but no one who volunteers on this list, not me, not 
Pam Geiger, nor anyone else,  has the responsibility of clarifying how TBSM 
works on this list.  I suggest you be patient and let your marketing rep get 
those details for you.  That is his job.  Not ours.  I would, as I am sure 
anyone else would, clarify things for you if we could, but this is 
not the place to expect such an answer.

I'm sorry the "not my job" approach may be technically valid, but that still 
doesn't meet the support needs we have. What have you done to make the 
situation better? If Pam's role is not to communicate the trends and issues 
that are brought out here what is her role? Are you suggesting that right now 
we don't use this forum as a sounding board for development AND that it would 
be undesirable if we did? Lets summarize where a systems administrator is today 
for NetView education/support:

1. Take the class which still supports v5.1 and does not include several old 
topics (security, rulesets etc.) and certainly doesn't include the v6 and v7 
enhancements in their entirety.
2. Support web page: I can report PMRs but I can't really search other problem 
reports. I can look at the knowledge base which contains a lot of information 
about Tivoli (TEC, DM etc) but very little about NetView. Solutions that are 
available are typically quite old and you cannot proceed with confidence that 
the older materials are not out of date.
3. Tivoli Support doesn't provide fixes for problems you have yet (or are 
unaware) you have encountered. So you can spend your time resolving issues that 
people may have already stumbled upon. Maybe your production system is down 
because you are busy trying to figure out whats going on meanwhile a fix is 
sitting on an FTP server if you just knew it was there.
4. Tivoli marketing representatives are difficult to locate and lack the 
ability to form concise technical opinions because they have to cover such a 
board range of products they are unable to have the depth they need to answer 
technical questions. I am from a very small mid-west market and I still had to 
call 5 people over a 3 month period and follow up just to get a call scheduled 
to TALK about TBSM. 
5. Rely on RedBooks that typically are more than 5 years old (with the 
exception of the EXCELLENT Netview v6.01 and friends)
6. The Tivoli mailing list (this forum) doesn't not cover the periphery where 
this product blends with others. 
7. There is no "customization" guide - recommended ways to use NetView, 
strategies to deploy, or systems management paradigm. No tips about Cisco 
integration, no helpful hints for dealing with Microsoft devices, nothing more 
than a cookbook of procedures that you have difficulty identifying the context 
they should be performed in.
8. Tivoli Marketing Web Pages are a brutal trip down 100+ products that have no 
definition of how they interrelate and overlap. They are out of date, cryptic, 
filled with changed nomenclature that isn't even consistent within your own 
company. 

The sad part really is that I'm NOT the one with the issue here. I have a 
functioning system. I'm pretty sure I can make the marriage between mainframe 
and distributed NetView work - somehow. I tried to start an enhancement forum, 
I participate in Netview ESP and CIP programs, I write enhancement requests, I 
do the leg work support needs to fix the code. I'm not sure who should be 
paying who for support here.

Sorry if this seems brutal. You won't be hearing from me much anymore, if at 
all, in this forum. I am sure that will make your corner of the universe 
peaceful and serene. Good luck and thanks for all your assistance. You have a 
difficult job.