* As others I also feel BMC losing David is very sad because for this community Dave and Doug are really the only human faces from Remedy/BMC. Though there are several others from BMC participate in this list time to time, David and Doug stands apart by being more frequent and the kind of information they provide, their ability to address issues, stop fires etc... **
Remedy(ITSM more appropriately) always had and still has quality issues, but which product did not have the quality issues with the depth,breadth and flexibility of Remedy/ITSM supporting as many operating systems, databases, webservers,apis, hosted, inhouse, multitenant etc? I feel like BMC is finally taking measures to improve the quality of the product. But i s this enough? I do not think so. They need to do more things to do better and faster. Did BMC realized the ground underneath them moving? To me it seems they did. (Note:I am not employed by BMC, I am a mere Remedy developer or admin like lot of others in the list.) 1)People complained upgrades were taking years, not seamless, cost of maintaining customizations etc.. BMC came up with overlays. Even though it is not completely mature yet, it is a great step in the right direction.They provided Delta data migration utilities,templates, Data load consoles,sample data, white papers, best practices, webinars, recorded videos etc.. In the WWRUG they also POC the code releases into live production. 2)People complained installers run forever, BMC has combined and simplified lot of screens and input options in the recent 8.x version installers. For me it even ran faster and errorless compared to older versions. 3)People complained about quality issues, BMC has delayed the 8.0 release for several months on the same grounds of improving quality. I have not seen that happened before. BMC is more proactively seeking community participation for beta tests. 4)People complained about support asking too many times for the logs, BMC built some unified tools to capture all the logs from one place and zip them instead of developer collecting each and every log. Still takes significant time but better than it used to be. They even sent their customer support representatives to WWRUG to explain why they need/ask logs for several times. To me the kind of issues that people report in this forum, most of the times they are not very simple and straightforward. They do take long time to debug. 6)Now a days BMC is announcing webinars(I like them, kind of free training) more frequently to provide knowledge to the community on some of the complex processes like Atrium SSO, Reconciliation etc.. 7)People complained about AIE jobs take forever to import and reconcile and they came up with Pentaho and changed the way reconciliation is done in the recent release, instead of field by field comparison they are using now checksums. 8)People including myself complained several times about midtier cache corruption issues, even though it still happens it is much better in the recent releases. 9) It used to take long time to submit RFEs and now they provided easy option, you just have to create an idea in BMC Communities. 10)People complained about no OOTB email integration and they the recent releases have that. 11)People complained about the Change calendar look very ugly, and in the recent release the change calendar is very impressive. It has google calendar like look and feel. 12)People complained midtier user logs are not very intutive compared to thick client, recently they have improved a lot in that front. In the recent release midtier user logs looks more similar to the thick client user logs. 13) I also recently noticed seeing more techs from BMC participating in the communities and replying to the posts. I do not think BMC would do all of these if they do not care about their product,market and revenue. I think they need more time which became luxury now. I think every time there was a fire BMC is addressing it one way or other , but why should BMC wait until there be a fire to address them. * _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
