David Usherwood wrote:With 9.0 going off 'active' support next New Year, I was wondering how you are finding IBM's treatment of support issues?
Yeah, I noticed that. (The Admins are working on a FAQ post and one of the links I found for it was the
product support list.)
I'll let you know when I finally find enough time to locate the page that lets me log new support requests / look up my existing ones without constantly looping around to further login pages which show my name at the top. (Such name indicating that I'm
already logged in, and yet... more login pages. So you always seem to be getting closer, but never quite get there; the IBM web site seems to have been designed on an asymptotic architecture.) It's on my "to do" list.
You have to bear in mind that our primary environment is still 8.2.12. It's not
supposed to be, the intention was for us to have migrated by now, but it just took so naffing long for them to get 9.1 fixed so that it wouldn't tank if it ran two chores (and yes I know, some claim that it still does but I can't replicate it in my own environment), and then I found that the 9.1 memory bump was, to say the least, voracious (as I rediscovered recently, as noted in the thread that this one spun off from)... and so, stability being more important than features, we've stuck with 8.2.12.
Of course, 8.2.12 went off active maintenance a looooong time ago. In fact, ALL versions prior to 9.0 are no longer on active maintenance, 8.4 having finished at the end of last year.
The fact is, after this length of time we know where the booby traps are in 8.2.12. (Don't use SaveDataAll in TI, be aware of all the annoying quirks with chore scheduling, Delete Views in the File menu of Cube Viewer doesn't work, etc, etc.) That means that we don't really NEED that much in the way of active support. But we might if we upgrade because although the Iboglix mindset (dating all the way back to Applix) is "yeah, go ahead and just upgrade, we fixed that in a later version and hey, it's only a new version", as I've mentioned many, many times... it's not. Every new version is almost like a new product in some ways and needs to be tested extensively because you just never know what's going to have been missed this time; the two chore crash in 9.1 being a case in point.
In short, the lack of "active support" bothers me less than the number of things that could go wrong with migrating to a bleeding edge, unproven version. If there's been one advantage of the IBM takeover... it seems to have slowed the rate of rushing out new versions, meaning that you have more time before you fall several versions behind.
Though having said that, they're still not excessively generous with the support windows given that 9.1, which is not that old, goes off support at the end of next year as well.
While I appreciate that the product needs to be developed, and new versions need to be released in due course, I don't think it's too much to recognise that for all but small installations an investment in implementing any particular version of TM1 and getting it to work properly is one that is so expensive in both time and money that it should yield
years of use, and I don't mean a couple. Support windows should, IMHO, reflect this fact.