Rob Schramm wrote:
General Rant for ISV's and latest version....
How hard is it to put the latest version available numbers for your
software on the web in an easily accessible format? Apparently, with a
few exceptions, this must be a extremely hard thing to do (sarcasm). I
constantly run into roadblocks when trying to determine what the latest
version is for a given piece of software. I dislike having to call
up/e-mail every single vendor just to find out what the latest version of
their product is. It sometimes adds days to my process when trying to
estimate how much work may be involved to upgrade a particular product to
the latest version. Sometimes the process gets so garbled, I end up
getting software keys (items I don't want) in addition to the information
I really want.
I will hold up a few Vendors that should be emulated ... IBM, Innovations,
MacKinney, Phoenix are a few examples of vendors that put the version
information out in an accessible format.
Your point is well taken. And, I very much appreciate that you mentioned
Phoenix as being one of the "good guys" here.
We maintain this table with the information you're describing as well as
links to download the product and latest service:
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/support.htm#NewReleases. Doing so is not
entirely a manual effort. Much of the table is built using SSI (server
side include) files which are uploaded to the web server by the product
owners using automated scripts. This information includes release
numbers and dates. For example, when new (E)JES service is made
available to customers, the "date uploaded" under "Corrective Service
Downloads" gets updated automatically because our deployment script
generates the date (using the REXX DATE() function on z/OS) and uploads
the SSI file using FTP. That makes it easy for us to keep the table
current. Anyone capable of writing software should be able to do this
for any number of products.
To expand on your point somewhat, I find the biggest question we get is
"which release(s) of product 'X' will run on release 'Y' of the
operating system." Our tech support people generally point customers to
this table: http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/prod_support.htm.
Unfortunately, maintaining this table for us is still a manual effort
and I already see an error which I will have corrected on Monday.
Specifically, (E)JES V4R7 should show it supports through CICS TS 4.1.
The table shows only CICS TS 3.2. :-(
--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
831 Parkview Drive North
El Segundo, CA 90245
310-338-0400 x318
[email protected]
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/
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