I feel I am speaking for a large portion of the IBM-MAIN constituency. There may be those that disagree with me, and they are entitled to their opinion and should feel free to voice that opinion.
We do not mind improved capabilities. However, a perusal of the comments on IBM-MAIN over the last 2 years will indicate a culture of inadequate testing (both performance and functional) for the "new" service tools and a general reduction in service availability. Some of the IBM-MAIN community have been quite vociferous on the subject. As an example, the problems with the "new IBMLINK" are legendary in this domain. We went from a 24x7x365 application and quarterly(?) maintenance to numerous prime-time outages and scheduled outages far in excess of the "old IBMLINK". The problems were sufficiently aggravating that IBM Executive Management's attention was drawn (by several large customers directly and numerous SEV 1 incidents). To give credit where due, the "new IBMLINK" has improved and is now "acceptable" (for some value of acceptable), however, the bad taste lingers. The recent SR/ETR issue is more of the same. It is ironic to me that a company whose flagship product advertises 99.99999% availability, cannot get its own service tools to perform to the same standard. The technology exists, please use it! <snip> I am the Initiative Leader for IBM's Problem Reporting Infrastructure. Within that initiative is the effort to migrate ServiceLink customers from the ETR application to IBM Service Request (SR). Based in part upon the concerns raised on this mailing list, we have slowed the migration and are evaluating a new deadline. An announcement was recently made on ServiceLink to this effect. We are also evaluating what more we can do during this migration time frame to ease your transition. I wanted to provide some general background on IBM's rationale for this migration. When IBM started its transformation efforts, our customers had six different applications to use, depending upon how they purchased their products from IBM. Our goal is to provide a single service request management application that supports all of our customers through all of our lines of business. Our primary customer value objectives are to eliminate customer confusion over which web application to use, combine best of breed use cases to improve ease-of-use, and ultimately increase satisfaction with our Electronic Support offerings. The SR application provides some substantial enhancements over ETR, such as: File uploads – Attach multiple files to the service request in-line View/manage all service requests – Manage service requests regardless of channel of input or of open/closed status and access archived service requests up to one year Business partner integration – Collaborate on service requests with your IBM-authorized business partners Language options – Interact in multiple languages based upon browser setting Personalization options – Personalize many functions and displays Continuous availability – Access to three hosting centers, each with internal redundancy, operating at 150% capacity in normal operation I have linked my presentation to SHARE from this past August in Boston. Some of the screen shots may be a bit different than current production, so please excuse that minor differentiation. As always, if you have specific issues with using the SR application, you can submit an assistance request online or via e-mail. Also, we have recently published a Technical Note for common issues that ETR users have experienced. This note will be linked from ServiceLink within the next few business days. </snip> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
