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.

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.