Things that still don't work

I had an interesting conversation with an ex-colleague of mine that is working on Pivotal 6. Over a couple of beers, we compiled a list of things that we believe still don't work in Sedna, and really should, since we are on the second service pack and a couple of hotfixes.

I am compiling the list to embarrass Pivotal, in the hope that some of these things make it into a future release soon. Also, anyone moving to Pivotal 6 can put pressure on their partner or Technical account manager to get these things fixed. According to Pivotal, it is the things that most people complain about that get fixed first, which I read as "if you have a large user base, hence paying a lot of support, you may get your problems fixed", so I am hoping that this prompts others to raise these as Pivotal incidents and we may make a difference.

1. Soft Required Fields - whilst a nice feature (putting blue blobs where you need information for a process) there is no way to remove them. You can remove them by setting not required, but that will also remove the required for save option.
2. You still need a list & business object to create a query. Why? Business objects & lists have no bearing on Pivotal 6
3. Can not transport a task, task group, command on it's own. For some reason, you need to transport a whole Taskpad, even though you can dynamically associate a command or task with an event in code.
4. No undo on the Form designer. I was told this was too complicated to implement, but surely as it is only an XML document, it should not be too difficult. Even one level of undo would be a godsend.
5. Can't cancel a OnFormIdRequested call. Back in 5.9, to display a form depending on the data of the record displayed, we used to use temporary forms, load them up, check out the data, then replace with the proper one. OnFormIdRequested was meant to replace all this mess. It works well for existing records, and even allows you to code form selection for new records, but if you want to ignore the request, returning null to the method gives you a nice error message. No way you can stop it.
6. Image icons on the secondary list can not be included. This is the one that got my mate fuming. If you convert a form with icons on the secondary it works as it should. But try and implement a new one. The field to attach the icon is not available. (Don't tell Pivotal, but you can edit the XML to make it work)
7. Tree control is not recursive. I would love to be able to deploy a control that had a fully recursive tree control, without code.
8. Journal pages just don't work. Work OK for existing records, but not for new ones. This is my biggest gripe. How this got through QA I don't know.
9. No server task for Outlook interactions - in the 5.9 days, you could mess around with the dll that was called when you linked an email to Pivotal, creating whatever records you wanted along the way. No more.
10. Colour schemes. You can anyone colour as long as it is Blue. Backwards step. Where is the high visibility for partial sighted?
    

Shock - Pivotal does not use Sedna

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.

Thanks, but no thanks

I received a comment yesterday.

Now you have got over the shock, I thought I would write a post in reply as I can not edit the comment and remove the personal details and I felt it deserved a full reply. I would not normally turn it into a full post (well, I might if I had more comments) but even though it was short, it raises an issue that is dear to my heart.

Hi PivDev,
Thanks for your honest feedback.
I am a product manager who works for Pivotal and would love to get some more feedback on some of your posts.
Feel free to contact me @ XXXX@cdcsoftware.com

Thanks

XXXX XXXX

Now, XXXX is not their real name and the email address has been changed so I am not blamed for filling this persons inbox. I am hoping that you realised this but thought I would make sure ;)

The commenter, lets call them Alan to ease my typing, was commenting on my last post Live In Action - Statue Style, which, if you haven’t read it (shame on you), raised a few issues with Sedna and the “demo” that was given of a customers system.

Whilst I would relish an email conversation about the current state of Pivotal 6 with a product manager at CDC, my anonymity whilst writing this blog means more to me. I am sure, with a bit of digging, anyone that is bothered could find out who I really am but I want to keep this blog anonymous for some selfish reasons, mainly keeping my family in bread and water and being able to talk about what I want without the dreaded spectre of upsetting current & future employers and being out of a job looming over me.

I also feel these conversations about the product direction and problems with Pivotal in alls it’s incarnations should be aired in the public arena to increase the knowledge available to the community. A community for any product or service, whether it is a business tool, game or device, only helps the product or service. Look how Salesforce & MS CRM has flourished because of the external groups making (and selling) functionality, discussing problems, and helping each other out with issues and solutions. You can also look at the communities around online games, media streaming products and other devices to see that they help evolve the product.

A social network may not add directly to the CDC Software bottom line, but a strong community encourages everyone to push the product to it’s limits, giving everyone more options in deploying to their end users, increasing the likelihood that the product is not replaced by something else and, more importantly, encouraging new customers to sign up when they search Google and see several sites full of information about how to do things.

I feel that CDC is not doing a tenth of what they could do in terms of encouraging this behaviour. Yes there are the official forums and the unofficial version, but where is the blog from a Pivotal insider? Where is the RSS feed of new patches & hotfixes? Where is the online Wiki(I know this has been tried unofficially, but seems to have fallen by the wayside)? Where are the online chats with Professional Services experts to answer questions and give advice? All this stuff is easy to create and develop, and probably would take very little encouragement for those of us who rely on Pivotal for a living to contribute to and little expenditure from CDC to organise.

This becomes apparent to me when I visit other customers. Everyone implements Pivotal in a different way, one of it’s key benefits over other CRM platforms (I am looking at you, SAP), but there are no samples around about how other users have done certain things, apart from those available in the official & unofficial forums. Mark Lyseyko’s (I hope I spelt that right) Tech Tips is good, but in the wrong format - try using this to search for some way of accomplishing a task.

What this, once again, long post (apologies if you got this far) boils down to is I hope that Alan does not take too unkindly to me not taken him up on his offer, and I hope I have let you all know why I think I shouldn’t. If Alan reads this, I would be happy to have a conversation with him over comments in the blog if he wants to address some of the points raised here or in earlier posts.

Live In Action - statue style

I am not sure what Pivotal’s definition of Live in Action is but it is a bit different than mine.

I have just watched the Pivotal 6.0 Live In Action—Sysmex Shows Off Their Solution webcast, recorded on Wednesday, and now available for all those who are interested. “Live In Action” it is not.

My idea of “Live Action” is not PowerPoint slides. I could forgive this if they had an interesting and powerful speaker, but, in my opinion, Don Patulo, is not. There is nothing new in the slides they showed, nothing that made me to think “Wow – I have to implement that, it was cool”. Sorry, Don, but my attention span lasted 20 minutes, even though the webcast is an hour long.

I am not sure who the intending audience was for this demonstration. Existing customer? Customers who are currently migrating? Potential Pivotal clients? What I do know is that the first 2 groups would not get an awful lot out of the presentation. There was no incentive to upgrade in there, no “Feck me, that is worth the pain of the upgrade”. Potential clients were not given a good demonstration of the capabilities of Pivotal 6.

I think this is negative publicity, especially for people who are evaluating Pivotal versus other products. Where was the live demo of a working system? Where was the awesome real-time connectivity to other systems such as SAP etc? Where is the pretty SharePoint portals made with something more than Pivotal graphs?

I remember seeing a demo of a customers system as part of the series of webcasts before Pivotal 6 was released, which was Live Action, was pretty (lots of SharePoint portals made with a decent reporting tool), had dynamic content in the forms and was a kick in the arse for me to try this stuff for myself. I finished the session with a list of things to try out and ideas for nice features that our users would love.

I came out of this demo wanting to write a grumpy piece for the blog.

5.9 SP3

I have just finished playing with the latest and greatest hot fix for 5.9, and, after been tipped off by one of the posts on http://forums.pivotal.com, can't believe that the smart portals don't work.

Pivotal have, for all my time working with the product, excelled themselves by breaking bits of the application when fixing another part, and this is something that affects all developers, especially with a complicated application that 5.9 surely is. I have been known to do this myself in the past, and I'm pretty good ;)

The only way to prevent this is to ensure your quality assurance processes and people are up to scratch. There should be a set of simple tests that are done for every release, whether it is a Pivotal release or one of your own, which are conducted in all the release versions you make, before they make it in to production and again as the first thing you do after the production release.

If Pivotal haven't got this process in place, haven't got the staff to do the work, what ever the excuse, then what are we paying our maintenance for? Are we in the wrong to expect a release from them not to break other bits of the application?

I know their concentration must be with Sedna now, but there are a lot of people on the 5.X platform that will be staying with it (and paying their maintenance) up to and beyond the date when support stops, surely we should expect some QA process to assist us going forward? Are they just relying on the likes of you and I in doing the testing for them?

The first thing Pivotal says when I come across any problem is to install the latest hot fix. I won't be doing so in the future unless they can prove my issue has been fixed, and it has been QAd effectively.

P.S. There is a fix for the issue with smartportals, coming in HF2 (SP3 less than a month ago), but if you need SP3 before then, there is a workaround documented here

Pivotal CRM Sucks

Whilst you might think this title is a little strange for a blog post by someone who makes a living from Pivotal software, but this is was the fourth highest search phrase used by visitors getting to the blog by a search engine.

Admittedly, this phrase has only been used 5 times by my readers (says something about the number of readers I have, poor me!) but I would generally like to know what makes Pivotal suck. 4 of the searches were from USA and one Australian, well their IP addresses are anyway.

Are those 5 disgruntled users who are stuck with a R99 windows client implementation? Have they been forced into using a badly designed system, or is it a genuine gripe about the functionality that Pivotal provide? Maybe someone will make a comment, that I will publish, which will enlighten me and the handfull of other professionals that read this.

Hopefully none of those searching are using Sedna, but would be interesting to find out.

5.9 SP3 Available

Just been on eservice.pivotal.com and see that Business Server & Rich Client 5.9 SP3 is available.

Whilst these service packs don't really add much for me, it got me thinking about other versions. Taking a look at

Product Support Roadmap

anything below 5.9 is now out of Mainstream support, with 5.7 finishing in May 2008 (a little later for the French & Japanese versions). 5.9 will come out of mainstream support in July 2010, so I assume that there will be a further service pack before then.

For all 5.7 and below customers - what is the next step? Upgrade to 5.9 to eek out a few more years (and have the difficulties involved with the License Server)? Take the plunge with Sedna? - God help you if you are a WAM client.

For all 5.9 customers, you have less than 2 years to get your systems over to Sedna, and with these lean times for IT projects I am not sure many will. The expense in converting is a real incentive to look at other products.

Pivotal - make our lives easier, and take some of the burden in getting on Sedna. Maybe reduce support costs if the client migrates, free consultancy etc. The only way you are going to get enough people on Sedna is to either make the pain of migration go away or give customers some incentive to inflict the pain on themselves.

Sedna Webcast Part 3

Having watched the Sedna webcast yesterday, I was disappointed.

Firstly, I was expecting some more insight into how the development was progressing, and got very little. This was more than likely because my expectations were not met. The first line in the invite was New Capabilities in Sedna Drop 5. Not sure I saw anything I did not know before.

What the webcast (Webinar was the word they used, but I hate this word with a passion. The Americans have a lot to answer for the words that they have introduced to our vocabulary, leveraging is another word that I can not stand.) did focus on was Migration strategies, and this bored me to death.

I think the simple strategy for WAM customers is 'Don't migrate'. They kept mentioning their 'Inexpensive' off-shore professional service which would convert your WAM customisations to Smart Clients, but I can not see this working for many customers. I would rather manage this transition myself with all the heart ache and cost it would involve.

Rich Client customers - there is a point. Hopefully being able to re-use some of your VB 6 code will assist in this process, but there is still a lot to do. Pivotal showed us the Active Form to Smart Client form conversion, but the end result was hideous. I think that businesses will use this as a starting point, but I think they will have to redesign the forms significantly to make the users think they have got something from the effort they have put into upgrading.

Another point they emphasised is the difference between conversion and migration. Conversion being a re-write, migration being re-using your business logic in the new Smart Client. Both methods fill me with dread, and will be expensive, particularly in the regression testing that will be required. The tweaks they stated would be needed for a migration will be more than a simple tweak, if you don't want the end application looking hideous.

I think the 2 days migration time they quoted for a system that has had minimal customisation is a joke. For any of my customers this would be a significant project, taking months of effort to test and deploy.

Don't get me wrong, the deploy and wait for mobiles / satellites PBS is a good idea, and one that I fully support, as well as the ED migration tools and Agent explorer, but I will wait until I get my hands on it before passing judgement.

I am not sure that any user will be upgrading in February. I certainly won't recommend taking this leap until SP1 is out. But I am also hoping that new customers will be willing to go to Sedna rather than 5.9 early in the new year as from the previous webcasts it looks good.

Role on February (more likely March or April!)

A Thanks and documentation

Thanks to Mr Kwiecinski for posting a link on his excellent forum (see link to right) to my lowly blog. I am astounded that a little mention such as this has resulted in people viewing my diatribe from as far away as Japan and New Zealand.

Also, a quick comment on his comment on my last post - heartily agree. As a partner, I get to see more that is coming from professional services than ordinary users, but this should be shared more. Allow users to play with bits, but have a one off charge to send them the code. This way the PS development can be charged for. The resources and examples out there are huge, but you need to know what to ask for and have a friendly Pivotal contact.

Last thing - when are Pivotal going to sort their documentation out? Don't get me wrong, the documentation is a lot better than back in the AA3 days, but there are still things that are not documented. How about a code sample in the API Reference for each function? What about ensuring the fields that are passed are explicitly labeled within the API?

Rant over, back to work.

Small World

Even though the Pivotal product is not widely used, it still surprises me how small a world is, well in the UK anyway. I often here about developers / consultants moving between companies, companies moving between consultancies but there still is not a lot of new customers (to my knowledge).

This is a worry, for a consultant like myself, with the knowledge that your key skill has a limited number of clients. I have always been critical of Pivotal's marketing strategy. Pivotal should be capitalising on it's key selling points - flexibility and stability. When Pivotal is installed at a customer site, the clients I have spoken to love it. It can do all they want, with the ability to expand to all they will need. Can you say that about MS CRM / Siebel etc?

I think Pivotal have missed a trick here, and hope (selfishly) that they start getting more clients soon. I know Sedna will hopefully be a huge step forward but please Pivotal, open the purse for some decent marketing.