I'll step in to defend BMC in this regard, acknowledging that I've had issues with various decisions that BMC has made in the past.
However, we are running ITSM 8.1 in production, and it was a lot easier than going to 7.6.4 from an earlier hybrid 7.x version that we had. To be clear, with three technical people, we completed an upgrade in place on super bowl weekend and were still able to watch the super bowl. I single-handedly installed everything, then my two colleagues jumped in and we fixed the overlays and worked on the customizations we had made specifically for 8.1. Probably the most work intensive thing after the installs was that one of my colleagues spent a few hours replacing our custom email processing system with an overhauled version of the Rules Based Email engine. We also have a very customized outgoing email system using HTML templates and code to display data from things that aren't on the same form (e.g. showing Tasks related to a Change Request on an Approval email, which uses a custom approval process that can update Work Info on a Change Request from the email, even with attachments.) We also have a lot of well-designed customizations and non-OOtB configurations. We have a third party SSO tool. We have a highly enhanced version of BMC Analytics. >From my perspective, the biggest issue we ran into that didn't come up in >testing was the Mid Tier performance and browser caching issues. We also shot >ourselves in the foot when one of the developers turned on Developer Mode >Caching and forgot to turn it off. However, in the grand scheme of things >these were solved either easily on our part or by applying patches and >hotfixes from BMC. It was frustrating to have any issues whatsoever, but any >enterprise application is going to be difficult to upgrade. There are things >I still don't like about the overlays, but now that I'm used to them, I think >they save us a lot of work with our customizations. Maybe the process would >be different to some degree if we were hosted by BMC, but we have no plan to >go to RoD in the near future (I am not saying it's bad, just that it isn't a >model we do a lot with right now.) So from the perspective of my company, we're fairly happy as BMC customers with the upgrade process. I've seen demos of Service Now and I admit that I like a lot of things about it, but I still think Remedy is easily a better fit for most companies. The few things that I liked better about Service Now seem like they're being addressed by BMC. If you have a sales person ask them if they can get you to one of their customer briefings or something else to see what they're working on. I can't speak to the zero downtime upgrade model for any product because I've not experienced that and I'm highly skeptical that any vendor could pull that off on any system with a lot of customizations, but being able to do a major upgrade on premise over the course of a weekend with three guys doesn't sound too bad to me. I even kicked off the first installer over VPN from my cellphone on my ride home (someone else was driving, of course.) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 2:24 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years" Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
