Last week I was doing a Webex with Pivotal support, and the support user shared his desktop.
I presume that he should not have shown this, but I saw my support incident in all it’s glory in the application that I assume they use for support.
I was amazed to discover which application they were using as their support application.
The cynics amongst you would probably say Microsoft CRM, Saleslogix or Salesforce. Wrong. Come on, even Pivotal would not be that silly. I am sure Pivotal license don’t cost them an awful lot.
The optimists amongst you, and this includes myself, would hope that they would use Pivotal 6, the latest and greatest patched up version with all the bells and whistles. Wrong.
The realists amongst would say that a year is not long enough to migrate an application from Pivotal 5.9, hence they will be using Pivotal 5.9 Rich Client. Not bleeding edge, but stable, customisable & only one step behind the current platform. Wrong.
The pessimists amongst you would be right, I was aghast to see Pivotal WAM. Not sure what version (I am an optimist, I’ll say 5.9), but it was definitely Windows Client. A heavily customised form with lots of tabs, very unlike the OOB support incident.
Surely, as a forward thinking company, they should be using the product they want us to migrate to? Surely they should be ditching WAM in favour of Pivotal 6 (or is the migration too costly and tricky?).
Could this be the ideal training ground for Pivotal Support to get their teeth into a real system so that when I ring up they know what they are talking about? If they did that, would they also see all the little issues that really annoy me? Would they be able to write some nice and shiny implementation guides? Would they get so frustrated with the poorly written documentation, they would force someone to write some excellent documentation which results in a lower number of support incidents raised?
If Pivotal can not get their support system using Pivotal 6, then what chances have the rest of us? I would love to here the reason for it from Pivotal. I would suggest they would come up with excuses about the number of users and the complex business logic, but that is no excuse, and is what the rest of us have been asked to deal with. They should really be at the front of their own technology. I know that internal systems are usually the worse supported for application developers, but they have had over a year to implement their Pivotal 6 system and several more to implement Rich Client.
Shame on you, Pivotal, shame on you.
Monday 23 March 2009
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3 comments:
I feel it's more a case that the migration tools are complete rubbish for Pivotal 5.X Windows Access Clients. The ASR conversion tool was completely useless last I tried it a few months ago, the Agent -> Sedna Task converter is still in (unreleased) beta. For systems such as the ones our clients use (with huge amounts of industry specific business logic, we have agents that won't fit on 2 monitors) we basically have to convert most of the functionality by hand.
I will have defer to your judgement on Windows Access Migration, as I only have experience on conversion from Rich Client.
I personally would not trust the code converters that Pivotal have published, preferring to convert them manually, that way you have a chance to update them in a more effecient manner.
I would suggest that the agent convertor would also produce such ineffective code that a manual conversion would be preferrable, if not necessary, to get an effecient system out of the end of the process
I think its internal matter to Pivotal management to decide whether they use Sedna or all their requirements are well fullfilled in the version that they are using. Did they sell Sedna selling their internal Deployment success story??. I dont think so. I have been using Piv for almost 8 yrs now and i have also used other CRM tools (SFDC, MSCRM etc). None of them can match the quality of attention you get for your concerns.
Well having said that, i wont disagree with you that Sedna does need lot more enhancements and has to improve the tools of migration.
Jai Ho Pivotal.
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