>I have searched the IBM Service Request (SR) Support Team ticket history and >could find no submission from you. Let's just say that I am tired of providing feedback to IBM through the regular channels. I have done that too often to bother this time around, too. I am also tired of IBMs general response that since SR (or ETR or-you name it) is FREE, why should they do anthing? And yes, I got that response on more than one occasion, not in writing, obviously.
>It appears that last service request you managed via the SR application was in >October. Yes, and I won't use SR again until I absolutely have to, i.e. after ETR sunset. I was sick almost immediately of the deluge of useless emails I got after updating that one incident. In addition to the emails I got from servicelink, which were a lot less (they *have* learned that lesson!) and much more meaningful. Oh, and I had been an on-and-off user of SSR for years, too, so when *that* switched to SR, I had prior exposure to SR. And the email deluge wasn't as bad back then. >While SR is by no means a "student project" that was "coded by clickers", it >could always stand improvement. Which makes one wonder why IBM hasn't learned anything from their prior switching of users to PC-based tools. Or even from *why* certain things are done the way they are done in ETR. >I could not reproduce your experience >I'd recommend you contact our support team at srh...@us.ibm.com to see if >they can help. I don't mean to pick on Christian, but this is the stereotypical support answer. With the general result that they want *screenshots* of the failure, wasting our time in providing documentation, even when their own (country) support can reproduce the problem. Some of the support people even have no clue about the difference between javascript and java, what activeX controls are and that there are several ways of (dis)allowing them. (Even I with my well-known aversion to everything clickable know this!) In addition, the usual 'please empty your history' (gaining one day) and then 'please also empty your cache' (gaining another day) is annoying! That's the first thing any thinking user does. IBM websites quite obviously believe that the rest of the world keeps their PCs wide open securitywise. Which means the next thing you get is 'please enable this-or-that'. For every website. Even malicious ones?!? The cookie deluge that is required for IBM websites to work is bad enough. >1. Is SR cheaper? According to IBM, ETR is "free". (Never mind that you have to have a software contract that entitles you to getting support in the first place.). How much "cheaper" can you get? <sarcasm off> >2. Is SR more reliable? One of its predecessors, SSR, used to work when ETR did not. Unless the signon application didn't work. Not to mention that the vm application used to work beautifully regardless of any clickable stuff. >3. Is SR response time faster? Not in my neck of the woods. And especially not if the pages are counterintuitive to use and it takes forever to find the right place to click. >4. Do SR records get priority over non-SR records? They are all funneled into Retain, and the (MVS) people working on them couldn't care less how the PMR got there. If anything, last I had seen, even more rubbish is put into retain from SR than from other sources, obfuscating the *content* of the problem and making it much harder to even *find* the 'real' answer among all the clutter. >5. Is SR easier to use?. Not as far as I am concerned. So what's *my* benefit from yet-another-hard-to-use-tool? And those other ones listed by Christian as "substantial enhancements over ETR", such as: >File uploads Attach multiple files to the service request in-line Have *you* ever tried to upload a 5-model-9 standalone dump to IBM? Not to mention that you have to download it to the PC first. By now, every installation for z/OS has their own way of submitting information to IBM. While other platforms may like that, it is NOT an enhancement for z/OS. >View/manage all service requests Yes, well, why does IBM believe that the customer memorizes problem numbers instead of providing the comment from ETR that a problem was opened with? I see that that *still* hasn't been addressed, probably in the hopes that it will be gone once the PMR was opened with SR. And why bother with a migration help? >Business partner integration And who will input those business partners? The admin?!? Why bother? Or is this part of IBMs strategy to have all the world use the same tools? >Language options Interact in multiple languages based upon browser >setting Yes, and PLEASE save me from so-called 'multilingual' applications! How's that for a webpage? "Auswahl bevorzugter Produkte und Komponenten You dont have any saved products. Please see the Supported products tab to select a product." Or a menue choice called "Display Setting" among the other German menue choices. That would be 'Bildschirmeinstellung', thank you very much! Thank you, I prefer my webpages in one language ONLY! And the so-called 'browser-setting' (which in my case is German so that other German websites work where the English version is terrible) enforces this mishmash on the IBM pages. It would be much better to enable me to store my language preference somewhere in my profile instead of using a browser-specific, all-webpage-on-the internet-encompassing default! Not to mention that I have to use the English version, anyway, in order to be understood by native-English-speakers. I'm not American expecting the rest of the world to use *my* native language! (Some exceptions noted for Americans!) Besides, the German Grammar in SR is a catastophe! Personalization options Personalize many functions and displays What I can see there is not any better than what I could do with Servicelink. So I repeat: What's my benefit? >My authority to 'approve' users is gone. Be thankful! :-) Since I was (and am) the servicelink admin, IBM made me SR admin *without my consent*. And despite my complaining to IBM about it, they haven't undone this. Which results in 5 to pages of emails every time IBM does something to the permissions in SR. I won't approve any user to SR that I don't personally know (or that my management told me to approve), and believe me, the mainframe community working on z/OS is a VERY small subset of the SR users here. The requests to access SR that I have gotten were all for other departments where I have no clue if they are entitled. Besides, it doesn't matter, as IBM grants them 'temporary access'. The temporary is indefinitely or gets set by *someone* at some other time, as I certainly didn't do anything. My backup didn't, either. What's more, *every* user now has 5-12 entries for entitlement (automatically done by some migration process probably, and that's even more than back in October), with no easy distinction on *what* they are entitled to. (Not that I as a technician have a clue about the contracts we have and the distinction between 'software entitled' and 'not-software-entitled' or the other cryptic stuff.) It is really bothersome to read through that list. Makes it real easy to even *find* the user you're looking for! And to add insult to injury yet again, there is no way to delete a user permanently, not even those that have left the company. >Please continue to manage your user list via ServiceLink. Let's see if that deleted user now gets migrated into SR! >My contract is missing. Same here. IBM is fond of switching the entitlement for software ETRs to customer numbers that we don't even know about, so everyone opening a PMR got called for a cpu id to do entitlement. Never mind that the entitlement people never asked themselves why this suddenly started. Some of them then switched the customer number in the retain record to the new customer number, effectively making it impossible for us to *see* the ETR/SR/whatever. When I got angry about getting called for entitlement, it turned out that we had several new customer numbers that didn't show up in SR. At least in SR, I was able (after getting entitled by the support person) to see the other customer number our problems had ended up with. And now that we have sorted that out and according to management the software support contract could switched to the old and familiar customer number, everyone is entitled to *both* numbers. >My product list is missing. And I saw too many, most of them out of support, anyway, in a ten-line-mini-window. Great for >200 products! >I got "No results" I see that that hasn't changed. SR didn't even understand the compid that I had a PMR open for and told me 'no results'. Enough venting. And Christian, please don't take this personally! Regards, Barbara Nitz ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
