I’ve had another comment.

After you have got over the shock of 2 comments in less than a month, let me tell you it is in reference to a rather old post (October last year) I made about the search terms used to get to my little blog. Pivotal sucks was number 4 in the list of search terms to find my blog back in October and I used this fascinating fact the basis of a post (I will use anything to conjure up a post). Currently this term is number 3, behind “Pivotal CRM” & “Pivotal 6”. Anyway, this is the comment in full.

Regarding the out-of-the-box system, it is completely unusable without extensive customization.

Next they will not support you because your system is customized (Catch-22)

Licensing costs (Pivotal+SQL Server+Win Server+Hardware

Absolutely nowhere to get help beyond the feeble tech support people in India...lack of a customer community.

Servers randomly shutting down, spitting out incomprehensible error messages.

Limited ability to upgrade, performance of Pivotal 6.0 sucks on the desktop!

Regular loss of data (specific to mobile and satellite synchronization)

Anonymous posted this, and I respect him or her not posting their contact details. I also thank them for their frank rating of the product. Rather than replying to their comment directly, I am going to give my view on each part of their comment.

Regarding the out-of-the-box system, it is completely unusable without extensive customization.

I totally agree. The CMS is limited, but the whole point of taking on Pivotal as a CRM application is that you tailor it to your business needs. This is one of the big positives for all my customers. They are not required to alter their business processes to match what the product says they should be. No two business processes are the same, regional differences aside, and I feel that the CMS code should be used a starting point and reference for your business analysts & developers to tailor and rework to your specifications.

The CMS was produced back in R99 days and has not changed significantly since then. Yes they have added more features, but at it’s core, the same functionality has just been ported to the new versions. Because of this, I believe that the CMS should be started again. Other vendors do not have the history with their CMS, which tends to them not having to worry about backwards compatibility. Revisiting the CMS would take a while, but would make the CMS more in tune with the way companies view CRM today.

Next they will not support you because your system is customized (Catch-22)

Sorry Anonymous, but I have never seen this. If you have used their tools to customise, I have never known support to quibble about something that is not working. If you import data directly to the database or change table structures via SQL directly, then I can understand why they would not want to support you. I can understand them not supporting your code, it is up to your developers to ensure the business logic meets your requirements, but if a method in the provided functionality does not work as expected, there should never be a problem getting support. Maybe you could give us an example of where Pivotal support has not supported you? I will be discrete and put my spin on it if you so wish to keep your anonymity intact.

Absolutely nowhere to get help beyond the feeble tech support people in India

Total agree. As a European customer, the closer of the Luton support office nearly made me cry. (I do need to get out more). The guys in India don’t come anywhere near the mark set by Luton or the Professional Services guys I have dealt with. I am sure not all of this is a communication issue. I believe support and trainers should have some real world experience of developing the system they are supporting. You ring support asking for an expert who can quickly diagnose your problem, not go through the required stages until a more knowledgeable 2nd or 3rd level support guy is put on to your incident. This is always the case when I raise an incident. It takes at least 2 days to go through the motions, and then final get a meaningful response from R&D.

...lack of a customer community.

Another one I agree with. Whilst this is not all CDCs fault, a community can be established without the support of the vendor and often do, other vendors actively encourage communities, allowing users to access the application (on a 1 or 2 user license) at no cost. This leads to developers playing and coming up with innovative solutions for people to use free of charge or pay the developer for if they think it will work for them. I would love Pivotal to do this and they could do with little cost. No one can run a CRM system with 2 licensed users (OK, maybe a 2 person company, but I am sure they could work more effectively with an Excel spreadsheet or A**ess database (I think A**ess is the worst swear word there is))

The only people developing Pivotal are those that are paid to do so. There is an awful lot of talent out there in other communities that use the tools as they enjoy it and may get some recompense in the long run for their efforts. As a developer I do not have time in my life to play with Pivotal outside of what I need to do in my current position. I am sure that everyone else is in the same boat. Give the application away will allow other to play such as students and others who have more time on their hands.

That said, there are still communities out there, official & unofficial forums, but exchange of ideas do not seem to happen, in my experience anyway.

Servers randomly shutting down,

Not sure I have ever seen this apart for the license manager. I have always found them quite stable, as long as the environments stay the same.

spitting out incomprehensible error messages

Well, that I agree with. Error messages are not anywhere near the quality they should be. When you have not set or incorrectly set the filepath and then try to assign a license, you get a message about not being able to connect to the DSM and to look in the relation.err file. I have never once seen this file have anything meaningful in it. It is not a DSM issue but because you did not set the filepath. I am tired of second guessing what the errors mean. Pivotal 6 has made this worse with incomprehensible errors with lots of information, but you have to look out for the error icon in the bottom frame. How does a user know what is going?

Don't get me started on other documentation. If you have not had experience in the product, you have not got a chance to understand what is going on with the methods & properties that are available to you.

Limited ability to upgrade,

Anonymous does not say what system he is currently on, but I will take a stab at it being a WAM system and again, Pivotal has dropped the ball. Upgrading to 6.0 from 5.9 Rich Client is not easy, but at least you don’t have to re-implement everything.

WAM to Pivotal 6 - you may as well start again. The only thing that is of any use is the table structures, but I think I would even scrap most of these. Yes, they have your data in them, but the methods used in Pivotal 6 would probably make you rethink the way data fields are used.

I also think that they have removed the ability to customise the system by a non developer. Pivotal agents are something a primary school student could understand, with nice arrows connecting blocks. It led to some awful implementations, but a BA could do it. Now, you need a competent C# developer to do the simplest of tasks. I haven’t even mentioned the data import routines.

performance of Pivotal 6.0 sucks on the desktop!

I have to disagree with you here, Anonymous, but if I am right that you are on WAM, then i bow to your judgement. Pivotal 6 vs Rich Client performance is certainly a win for Pivotal 6 in my experience. This is assuming you have a cached copy of the form etc. First time through it is painful as it caches the business logic, after that it is lovely. I have no experience of WAM vs Pivotal 6. I have not seen any data from Pivotal on this either. You would have thought there would be pretty graphs showing the differences between loading a company record in Pivotal 6 vs 5.9 WAM vs 5.9 RC. Are they hiding something?

Regular loss of data (specific to mobile and satellite synchronization)

Mobile & satellite synchronisation, when administered correctly, is a god send. The administration of Mobile systems relies on Sales people or other users syncing regularly, and this is where the problems start, in my experience. I have not really seen problems with satellite syncing when the system is design with Satellites in mind. If you can segregate the users on each satellite and don’t have the same data frequently updated on both servers, then everything is fine. Poor segregation (or where a system is not designed with Satellites in mind from the start) have caused me numerous problems in the past. I now assume that all my systems will evolve into at least satellite systems in the future and design accordingly.

Anonymous – thanks for your comment, at the least I have enjoyed responding. If this post is read by those within CDC that can make changes, I hope that they see that it is not only me that has problems with Pivotal and the path it seems to be taking.

Activity Usage Monitor

A positive post, for a change.

I have just watched the recorded webex from Pivotal on Activity usage, available on the link below

http://cdcsoftware-marketing.com/mk/get/WE-CM-ACTIVITY-USAGE-MONITOR-NOV-11-LONG

This is the stuff I wished there was more off. Yes, it is an add-on that you have to pay Pivotal a bit of hard earned profits for but it gives you an idea of what is possible within Pivotal 6.

The Activity Usage functionality, I presume, adds code to the events when certain things happen in your system – ReportRequest, SearchLoaded etc, and then stores in a table what, where & when so you can make some pretty pictures from the data added to the tables. I am sure there is a lot more to it than that, Pivotal have to earn the cost of the add-on for something. I am also positive that a good developer will be able to create this functionality, and add more detail, with ease.

Often I see client & server side logging of information, mostly for debugging and error capture, but this takes it one step further. Want to know when the last time a piece of functionality was used? Bring up a graph and take a look. Users complaining that a report or search is taking too long? You now have the figures to prove it is not the system, it is the fact that they are using search conditions that make the search take an age (wild card searches for example in a large memo field). It also gives you an insight into where to improve performance, adding indexes to tables or search terms that are frequently used. You can now make informed decisions where to spend your development budget from the areas that are constantly hit, rather than who kicks up the most fuss.

I just hope that it is coded in such a way that performance is not degraded significantly to make the use of the tool a detriment to the users. Have Pivotal produced figures to show the change in performance by using this tool?

It is a lovely piece of functionality. Do I encourage anyone to buy it? Depends on the cost (something that is not apparent in the Webex), if it is less than 3 man days of developer time, then no. That is the time I would estimate to do this in Pivotal 5.9 or 6 on my current system, it may take more or less time on your system, but this is a good ball park figure for anyone.

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.

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.

To Bordeaux and Beyond

Just read through the latest presentation uploaded to eService.

Bordeaux (not quite as far as Sedna) is coming, the new version of the 6.0 platform, which will replace the frankly old Sedna stuff. About time too.

It seems that this will not be a big rejig of the whole interface as in 6.0, but be a 5 - 5.1 - 5.7 transition. Keeping the back end the same, but adding functionality. Somethings that tweak my interest

• Choice of Smart client & thin client (thin client is back!)
• External data access - excellent, no longer producing bespoke asp pages.
• Reporting services for reports - at last, getting rid of the Crystal environment. Do you think the price will come down as they don't have to pay Business Objects
• Visual workflow - is this a pivotal agents replacement? I hope so.
• Integrated dev environment - no toolkit? At all? Going to miss it.
• Windows Mobile is going to be supported. Now just have to get support for iPhone, Symbian & Android to fully be a mobile solution.

No release dates yet, but I can not download the accompanying webinar, so might have missed some detail.

Hope Bordeaux is a better release than SP1, the treeview is really a big step backwards.

Wiki

I notice that there is a wiki started by a member of Pivotal CRM Forum.

http://www.pivotalcrmforum.com/index.php?topic=490.0

Looking at the thread, it is a wonder that CarlC started it all, with what seems like a lack of support from the rest of the community, with the exception of those that responded to the thread.

If you want to get involved, improve on the poor documentation that Pivotal provides us, and to document how to use Pivotal correctly, please go to

http://pivotal.wikia.com

and add some content, suggest some stuff, and generally help out.