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.

Sharepoint again

Following on from my previous post on Sharepoint, I thought I would follow up on what the final solution was.

The customer has now implemented sharepoint storage of documents through out their business, relying on web segments linked to various points of the sharepoint document library. I have learned several things on the way, more to do with the complexity of using the Sharepoint webservices and the limitations of Sharepoint than functionality within Pivotal.

Simple one liners to create folders are easy to come across on the web, but it is tricky to ensure you are creating a folder in the correct location and file structure.

I think Sharepoint integration should be a standard feature, instead of storing in the local database, as Sharepoint is free and has version control etc which is not possible (well, probably possible but difficult to implement) with standard documents within Pivotal

Pivotal Visual Studio Plugin

I thought that I would share with you all something I have been working on for quite a while, in between work and family stuff.

It is a addin for Visual Studio 2005 & 2008 which aids in building .NET appserver rules, available here

http://www.codeplex.com/PivotalVSAddin

The addin places a new toolwindow into the VS ide, listing all the tables within a Pivotal BM. From here, you can drag and drop fields, queries and tables into your code, as well as generating full constants and appserver scripts. On installation, there will be a new option, Pivotal CRM Addin under the View / Other windows menu. You will have to connect to the appropriate database on first run, as well as load the configuration file.

It has the following features in this first release.

1. Drag and drop fields, queries and tables from addin into current project code, including mulitple select.
2. Create full appserver rule definition, or constants class
   
3. Detailing of Active Forms, Tabs, Segments and fields, including properties etc.
4. Jump between foreign key field and it's linking field
5. Jump to the field definition for an active form field
6. XML configuration of constant and class generation
7. Support for Microsoft SQL Server & Oracle databases.
   

The project is released under the Apache license which allows everyone to use and modify for their own purposes. What I would like is to you to have a play with it, and suggest improvements (and bugs) on the codeplex project page. What would be great if someone out there is willing to help me improve it. The codeplex page has limited documentation at the moment, but I (and hopefully you) will improve this over time.

I want to expand it to be more useful to Sedna projects, but I have not got my head around the XML that a form generates yet, but someone might be able to help with that.

Think I should also mention that this is no way endorsed or developed by CDC Software or it's subsidiaries. Pivotal and other trademarks are owned by CDC Software.

Let me know what you think, and whether it is worth expanding on.

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.

Error handling

Whilst I, like all of you I am sure, never write code which would need an error handler, I am intrigued on how this is approached across the various deployment I have seen.

Some deployments leave errors in the lap of the gods, and to be honest, the error handler in Pivotal meets a lot of peoples needs. Others rely on logging all errors to an external file, even others create a separate error class in the event viewer to show what is going on.

I just have a feeling that all this error handling adds to the complexity of the situation, and can be the majority of the code.

With the essential try...catch in C# I am coming to the conclusion that it is essential to log as much as possible at the lowest level when an error occurs, as the user never gives us the whole picture, certainly not remembering exactly what they did and copying the error message. A vague 'Pivotal is broken' is the usual phone call I get.

New site

It still amazes me how little I know about Pivotal.

I am on a new site, where Pivotal has been running for some time, and seeing how they have customised and developed their solution gives me new ideas and ways of approaching customisation of the system.

It is a 5.9 Rich client system, heavily customised in most areas, and their use of non OOB functionality is great. What it tells me is that you can teach an old dog new tricks and there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The client is planning on moving forward with 6.0, and I hope to be at the forefront of this development.