Been a while

It has been a while.

Firstly, sorry for not sharing my thoughts with you for a while, work and family life have intervened to prevent me from publishing my thoughts. Happy Christmas / Hanukkah / New Year / Martin Luther King Day / Presidents Day / Insert holiday I have missed here to you and yours. Hope you had a lovely time. Anyway, enough of the pleasantries, back to work.

Secondly, is Sedna still in beta? It certainly feels like it. Recently, I have been deeply involved in an upgrade project, taking a heavily customised 5.9 system into the new world. It has not gone live yet, but it should do before Easter. We have gone through the hard tasks of migrating forms (damn they look ugly when first migrated), converting code (it’s amazing how many things in scripting I used to rely on that just don’t work anymore), designing new forms (I am not an artist, someone really needs to through some flowers at the forms when I have finished) and getting our heads around the navigation (all the possibilities really prevent you from getting it done). UAT stage one looms next week. I am going to have to get my head down and code the priorities, so it might be a while before I post again.

The users verdict – excellent! Performance is better, usability is better, outlook sync is an essential.

My verdict – so so. Performance and usability are better. Outlook sync is nice and easy to implement. The problems I have is that there are things that do not work – logging of new records, soft required fields have a tendency to remain marked, tree control is not as good as it could be etc etc.

I would expect this from a beta product, but not a polished, finished version. It seems that the R&D folks have never create a system using their code. If they came and sat next to me for a couple of hours (or any developer who is trying to produce functionality for an end user) they would see that the product is still rather flaky. Are they getting feedback from their own professional services guys? Doesn’t look like it or the professional services guys are not pushing the application to it’s limits.

And have I ever mentioned that the documentation sucks? It really becomes apparent how much my 5.X knowledge was from experience. I knew what was possible and what was not from experimenting, not from the documentation. The same goes for Sedna. It really is poor. I just hope Mr Munro gets his finger out and does something about it.