User Administration: We have one and only one contract that entitles us to defect and nondefect support. I get shown 9 times one customer number and four times another customer number, with no clue what the differences are. In any case, I am forced to click 'show all contracts' since I have no clue what the differences are. Oh, and "Show or update list below" is pure crap if there is no list to be shown just yet.
On the page that shows me the users migrated from ETR, each of them has 9 contracts, all of them enabled, of course! Each "Authorized user" has three states (anwesend -present, abwesend - absent, inaktiviert-inactiv). It is NOT explained what those states mean. The help page (srHelp) defines states as 'aktiv' (active), 'inaktiv' (inactive) and 'beendet' (very stupid translation, literal translation back into English is 'ended'). What's interesting is that I am "Technical Contact" for all 13 of those "contracts", while my backup CSA from servicelink is "Technical contact" for only five of them (my guess is the initial five from early October; and we have probably "aquired" the rest of the "contracts" when IBM sorted out the contract mess that they themselves had made and made a bigger mess for SR while they were at it!). Even the original 5 "contracts" are too much! And IBM has decided that I am the admin for this, without my consent. (Servicelink on the web asked me if I agree to be the admin.) I can add and copy user in SR, but I cannot delete any user. (Needless to say, the tabs are in English, the rest of the page in German.) There is a tab called 'Provisional' that wasn't there back in October. Apparently IBMs default is to allow 'provisional access' to each and every contract (all 13 of them) if someone just knows the customer number and requests access. Once I noticed that, I have removed the IBM default of allow-all. Other admins might want to do the same. Then there is a list of 'auto-approval' email addresses. Well, my ibmid is NOT an email address, and a lot of my colleagues' ibm ids aren't, either! There is more "multilingual" crap in there, as the links to add are in English. Once I click that, I am thrown into a page that looks like some beta-testing page, without the rest of the links. In this case I am forced to use the back button of the browser to go back to the previous page. At this point, I cannot even see at a glance if IBM has decided to put anything on any 'auto-approval' list behind my back. ----> 1. Show me ONLY the (one) contract that entitles us to software support! Or the contract with the highest entitlement setting for defect/nondefect software support. ----> 2. Make an effort to use the correct German terminology! ----> 3. Make sure that the help pages actually describe what the pages show! ----> 4. Don't sort out contract mess(es) made by IBM on the customer's time! ----> 5. Give me a function to permanently delete an SR user! ----> 6. Change DEFAULT provisional access to NONE, meaning that nobody can see our software problems when he just knows our customer number! ----> 7. Don't put anything on any 'autoapproval' list by default! Thank goodness that there was nothing to do for 'partner administration'! My Profile-Notification preferences: Once I click on "Send notifications by e-mail also" I probably get the flood of useless emails. Until then, the notifications will probably show up under 'My messages'. To be tested (and complained about) later. My Profile-Display Setting: (which is NOT German): Has a field called 'Service requests displayed on my home page' where I can put in at most 50. The actual page allows that to be up'd to 100. Why not here? And since when do I have a 'home page' with IBM?!? I have changed "My preferred agreement selection method" from contract to serial number - it doesn't make any difference in how our contracts are presented. ----> 8. Make the profile setting consistent with what's allowed elsewhere! (see part 1). ----> 9. Do NOT provide useless settings! My Profile-Prefered Products: The page MyPreferredProducts.action shows text that makes it sound like a list were displayed. And like I could choose one and add it. Well, there isn't any list displayed! Never mind that SR has no clue that just about any compid belonging to z/OS 1.10 (or whatever the zos-release is) would need to be displayed here. With every upgrade from one zos to another (with unchanged retain - compids, but changed descriptions - remember the 7.5.0 part!) that list would need to get edited, anyway. In that case, I am not even going to use it in the first place. 180 compids in my preferred list is as bad as 'all supported' that I am currently shown. Since SR boils it down to the compid (as that is what retain uses for routing), at the very least they should allow me to type that in directly! ----> 10. Remove the profile setting for 'prefered products' as long as SR doesn't understand that compids for z/OS are not release-specific! My Messages: Aha, SR has now become an internet forum, with its own messages about getting notified. Never mind that it takes about 30s to get a response back. My Agreements: gets me a page called nomination.action. From what is shown here, it looks like this is what *every* user is shown who happens to know the customer number and requests access, as this is essentially a summary of what one can do to get access. To top it off, it tells me my email address and requests (with a yellow attention triangle, no less!) to click on having IBM send me a confirmation email (actually, they call it 'checking email' - translation back from a bad German translation) with a link that I should then click to confirm that this is my email id. Huh? What kind of crap is that? I know that this is my email address, and I already am the technical contact (much to my dismay!). ----> 11. Tailor the page 'My Agreements' to whoever is logged into SR and skip useless stuff! 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
