Jason Thank you (and Dan and Misi) for running this list for as long as you have. The school district I work for started as a custom shop back with 4.5. A consultant built a help desk and inventory management system for them and I came in after leaving FMC/SHL/MCI/WorldCom/EDS (ah, the era of corporate buy outs) following the latest merger. I cut my chops during the MCI phase when they were partnered with Remedy designing ITSM. I have posted questions to the list very infrequently but did a lot of lurking, squirreling away the posts I knew would be helpful. In 2017, I asked for us to upgrade to ITSM, the oob solution, as there was no way for me as a lone admin/developer/support person to replicate SmartIT and DWP. The only “custom” work I do currently is adjusting the remaining custom apps (textbook tracking and financial systems change mgt) as we migrate from release to release.
To address Peter’s comment on product management, I’ll relay my experiences after spending much of my time in the custom camp and only recently coming on with ITSM. I’m no longer a happy camper. For the amount of money outlaid (it was pricey for an educational institution, the bmc partner we used was disappointing, not to mention the ongoing headaches), I think we may have been better served putting out a request for quote. And I’ve worked with the product since 1995! We went from 8.1 custom to 9.103 ITSM. Innovation Studio was still in development though it was heavily promoted during demos along with SmartIT/DWP. It was at this time BMC was renaming everything and combining modules/pricing - so what we saw ended up not being what we bought, a bit to our surprise. Also because of the changes, the consultants did the install out of order not understanding which modules were supposed to be included. Even with all that trouble and the oob glitches, I was impressed with ITSM/SmartIT/MyIT. The staff much preferred SmartIT over mid-tier. When our superintendent wanted district wide request ticketing, I thought we ought to leverage the SRM/DWP package we already had instead of replacing what we just upgraded. More licenses and an upgrade to 19.02 later, I’m now hesitant to recommend Remedy again. It all comes down to quality and governance, specifically with testing and documentation. We upgraded in late June going to 19.02 as I thought surely any big problems will have already been resolved within 4 months. Not so much. The stability of previous releases is no longer guaranteed it seems. I’ve had cases open for things that should have been caught before the release was made. Seriously, not all of the product catalog in ITSM will display in SmartIT? And then support is telling me, “just upgrade” to 19.08 to fix it, no hotfix will be offered? My impression is that support is thinly parsed out for existing products - fixes aren’t happening for ITSM major releases because most of the resources are Helix focused. I had thought to upgrade to 19.08 over winter break. I’ll instead be applying patch 001 and the hotfixes for 19.02. It’s killing my productivity to be drilling down into bug issues instead of doing daily admin activity. And before anyone says “Get the Helix products,” that bond money well is dry until 2023. I wish Doug well on his retirement and am glad that if BMC takes a wrong turn, he’ll have some distance. Thank you to all the other listers too for their contributions over the years! Carina From: ARSList <arslist-boun...@arslist.org> On Behalf Of Adams, Peter Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2019 3:39 PM To: ARSList <arslist@arslist.org> Subject: Re: Anybody still doing Custom Development? Let me comment on this from a BMC product management perspective, as I’ve seen a lot of speculation around the BMC strategy in this area. - With digital transformation initiatives going on in many organizations, there is a continued demand in the market for “build” capabilities. Software solutions & service created as part of these digital transformation initiative need to be innovative and differentiating by nature, and that can often not solely be covered by “out of the box” capabilities. Clearly, there are various options how to do this “build” (from “no code” to “pro code”), but for me it’s clear that “builders” continue to be in demand. - If you started to build a new solution from scratch, BMC has a world-class rapid development environment in the cloud with BMC Helix Platform (Innovation Suite). We continue to see customers and partners build very interesting new solutions on this platform at a very high speed. If you haven’t looked at this offering, I definitely recommend to check out https://developers.bmc.com/. The latest version of BMC Helix Platform cannot just integrate with existing AR System based solutions via API, but you can also define AR System forms as external records<https://docs.bmc.com/docs/helixplatform/creating-external-record-definitions-870730346.html?src=search>, so that you easily build innovation on top of your existing AR System investment. - We continue to a significant portion of our ITSM customer base being interested in tailoring or extending our ITSM solution, even though we continue to deliver the industry’s most robust ootb ITSM functionality (see recent Gartner ITSM Critical Capabilities report). It’s a result of the fact that we are supporting some of the largest, most complex and most demanding companies and government organizations in the world. Therefore we continue to consider this development / tailoring capability in our ITSM solution as very important. We also have a number of customer who have invested quite significantly in custom solutions built on AR System, and we plan to continue to serve them, because a transition to a BMC Helix Platform based solution may take a while. Therefore we do plan to continue to enhance our platform capabilities in the development area as well. - We have invested in the past in enhancements to AR System’s DevStudio. Not in every release at the same level – sometimes the focus had shifted on to other investment areas, such as operations/administration of the platform – but there are a number of new capabilities in DevStudio, such as the new option to call 3rd-party REST API or the integration of DevStudio with RSSO. And in fact, we do plan to further invest here in the near future. Unfortunately I cannot share details about the future outside of roadmap briefing. But I can certainly say that the AR System platform, incl. it’s development capabilities, is certainly still very relevant for BMC and that it continues to see investment. Hope that helps, Peter Adams From: ARSList <arslist-boun...@arslist.org<mailto:arslist-boun...@arslist.org>> on behalf of Jason Miller <jason.mil...@gmail.com<mailto:jason.mil...@gmail.com>> Reply-To: ARSList <arslist@arslist.org<mailto:arslist@arslist.org>> Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at 11:44 AM To: "arslist@arslist.org<mailto:arslist@arslist.org>" <arslist@arslist.org<mailto:arslist@arslist.org>> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Anybody still doing Custom Development? Hello my Lister family! As the list comes to a close in the near future I figured I would send my final post (in a non List admin role). I have two intentions with this post... One to have a final discussion regarding development on the AR System platform and 2) looking to find work doing AR System development or any Remedy work for that matter. 1) It has been years since our beloved List buzzed with posts from people sharing what they are building, how they are creatively enhancing ITSM (or building their own). We all experienced the transition from "we can build whatever the business needs on Remedy" to "we want ITSM out of the box." BMC stopped promoting Remedy as a platform to build your own solutions on years ago (actually, did they ever or was that left over from Remedy Corp?). Understandably many organizations had the desire to move to a packaged product that was supported and maintained by a vendor. I can't fault them. But I miss the creativity, the ingenuity, the excitement, and the reward of creating solutions (both ITSM related not ITSM related). Does this still exist anywhere? Even though I left my original Remedy home (Sharp HealthCare) a few years ago to relocate in Austin, the writing was on the wall there as well. I spent my last few years there building a lightweight ITSM suite from the ground up (because OOTB ITSM was too rigid and burdensome for that organization). However they are just about to go-live with Ivanti Service Manager, out of the box, no "customization". We had a history of building all kinds of business solutions, some not even IT related. Those will all go away when they retire their Remedy environment. Another Remedy shop where creativity and rapid development was king... gone. More recently at my current job, I built a filter a few weeks ago. It was a documented fix in a KA for an ITSM issue. Just being in Dev Studio again put a huge smile on my face. I was once again in my happy place, for those 5 minutes at least. It reminded me of the hours I spent a few years ago cranking out forms and workflow. Is anybody out there willing to share if they still use Remedy as a development platform? Is Remedy as a development platform really dead? While I would love for us to have a open conversation about what organizations are still doing Remedy development, I also understand there are confidentially concerns for some. Please feel free to email me directly if you wish (jason.mil...@gmail.com<mailto:jason.mil...@gmail.com>). 2) The contract I have been working under is quickly coming to an end and it is looking like I will need to find a new source of income. I would love to find out, not only are organizations still performing Remedy development, but even better if there are any with an opening for a Remedy Developer in Austin, TX or Remote. There is a ton of tech around me (the area has been called "Silicon Hills<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__en.wikipedia.org_wiki_Silicon-5FHills&d=DwMFaQ&c=UrUhmHsiTVT5qkaA4d_oSzcamb9hmamiCDMzBAEwC7E&r=-p3bdWG7vYdkTt7drxJU1lGabyBnkFDsCeyI4HR-08o&m=NPP4-6C98oW9PTBtkXIHbOo-vOYK_4NMxcWdpFxbvc8&s=Adtrzy6dV872LZlprrv99RL3POukmzHMHqPjSudPspA&e=>"), I know some of the companies in the area used Remedy at one point, but it appears completely dead here in Austin for Remedy work. Did BMC (heck, they even have an office here) really lose all of these customers to the competition? Hopefully this will catch somebody's attention in my area that is still using Remedy and we can connect. To clarify, while I love doing Remedy development (it would be my dream job), I have nothing against ITSM and am very capable and content working with the suite (it is my current job). Hopefully this post will spark one last (or a few) good conversation on the ARSlist. ***** Putting on my ARSlist Admin hat (or whatever my title is) ***** Dan, Misi and myself have been discussing the List's final days (ok, think what you will, but my eye just watered up after typing that). Due to some circumstances the list may live on a bit longer than was originally stated. So until the plug is pulled... Post away! Once the List no longer accepts posts/replies the archives will still be available. Happy Thanksgiving to my Remedy family in the US! And have a great rest of the week to my Remedy family elsewhere! Jason
-- ARSList mailing list ARSList@arslist.org https://mailman.rrr.se/cgi/listinfo/arslist
