From: Mark Zelden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I admit I don't like ISV products that
seem to require a version upgrade with every OS upgrade
If a vendor keeps his products up-to-date with the latest OS, and has logic
to ensure he doesn't try to run features that aren't available in an earlier
OS, I think customers should be able to install the latest version of the
vendor product regardless of what version of the OS they're running. That
way, they don't need to re-install the vendor product everytime they upgrade
their OS. Eventually of course their OS will catch up to and exceed the
vendor product, at which point they'd need to install the latest version of
the vendor product. But at least this would avoid some of the installs.
>
>If a customer on an older system tries to do something they can't do,
they
>might see a message along the lines of "This feature requires z/OS
version
>1.x".
Cart? Horse? How would something written years ago warn about a new
feature not being available. Unless you are assuming the software involved
was kept up to date. And how could that happen "without the customer
having
to install newer versions of the product."
If someone is running an old release of a vendor product on a new OS, the
old vendor product wouldn't have the newly introduced 'WHIZBANG' command.
The feature wouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the product, and the user
wouldn't try to execute it. But if they did try to execute it for whatever
reason, they'd see a "Command not found" message (or whatever). It would be
nice if they saw a message saying "You need version x.y of this product to
run the WHIZBANG command", but I haven't found a way to do that yet. :-)
Taking the situation in reverse where a customer is running a new version of
a vendor product on an old OS, the customer might see a 'WHIZBANG' button
and feel the urge to press it. In this case, they'd press the button and see
a message saying "You can't run the WHIZBANG function because your OS
doesn't support it". Even better, the WHIZBANG button wouldn't be visible,
because the product would be smart enough to hide buttons that don't work
with the customers OS. When the customer upgrades their OS, the WHIZBANG
button would automatically become visible, without the customer having to
install a newer version of the vendor product.
I'm not saying this would work in every situation and for every type of
product. I'm just saying that for certain types of products it's a way to
take some of the workload off the customers.
Dave Salt
SimpList(tm) - The easiest, most powerful way to surf a mainframe!
http://www.mackinney.com/products/SIM/simplist.htm
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