Scott and James,
If I can weigh in with my own frustrations. I am very new to Netview and
the whole Unix world Being such, a lot of this stuff goes over my head.
What disappoints me is that there are no user groups, meetings etc. where I
could try to gain added knowledge and expertise. Nobody I could talk to
and share information with directly. I've been to the admin class, and
while Charlie Carter is very, very good at teaching, he only has a few days
to beat everything into our heads.
I mean the Tivoli bunch have one that meets regularly. Why not Netview.
Guess it is because we are a poor cousin to Tivoli and so overworked and
under-maned in the business world that we could never get away regardless.
Mike Walsh
****Please Note - New EMAIL Address mike.walsh@us.ing.com*********
612-342-3118
"Barr, Scott"
<Scott_Barr@csgsy To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
stems.com> cc:
Subject: RE: [nv-l] another
list
10/15/2003 01:20
PM
Please respond to
nv-l
Well, I will weigh in on this from a different perspective.
I think the mailing list and a newsgroup both have significant limitations.
In this day and age, more facilities should be available for a user
community than just a simple email thread. If you look around at other
software products and their support forums, you see a feature list like
this:
1. Message threads / bulletin board
2. Download area for user contributions (i.e. let me share my script /
rulesets with you)
3. Chat room for online meetings with product experts
4. Patches
5. Documentation
6. Surveys / questionnaires
7. Enhancement requests
Just to draw a parallel - I play online games. If you go look at the
support site for a user community from one of the popular MMORPGs you find
a suite of tools and features that is quite robust and usually these are
supported by fans without a lot of capital to pay for fancy features - they
just use whats easily obtained and create some DAMN good web sites to
support their "guilds". It is extremely annoying to me, that the user
community for NetView is still living in the text only 1970s bulletin board
format.
I don't really have a preference about news vs. email, I just hate the
limited feature set for support so we have to keep answering the same
questions for folks over and over (no threads so we can't have a sticky
topic with FAQs) - no download area so we can't share files / scripts, etc.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nv-l-digest@lists.us.ibm.com
[mailto:owner-nv-l-digest@lists.us.ibm.com]On Behalf Of James Shanks
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 10:30 AM
To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
Subject: RE: [nv-l] another list
Folks,
I sent a posting to this list a couple days ago, which I don't seem to
be able to find any more, so I'll try again.
I inquired about this and was told that a Tivoli executive had ordered
the creation of this NetView newsgroup so that he could say that all
Tivoli products, like all IBM products, had one. Furthermore, the
mention of the newsgroup in the next version of each product's Release
Notes was also mandated. No one in my group nor in NetView development
even saw this boiler plate before the ID group replaced that book on
the CD. It was not considered technical content and therefore was not
given to them to review. That's why the nv-l list was not mentioned
there as well. I have already escalated this and I think that will be
rectified in the Release Notes to the first FixPack for 7.1.4.
As for the newsgroup itself, even the people who created it say that
they do not think of it is a replacement for the nv-l list, which they
admit is monitored by people with much more expertise than any newsgroup
is.
So my advice is that, as users, you "vote with your feet" as it were and
use the vehicle you prefer. This list is your forum after all; it was
started by customers for customers, and until it suddenly needed a home
and a Tivoli guy volunteered to rescue it, it was not maintained by IBM
at all. If you choose not to participate on the newsgroup, you need
not. I don't plan to, myself.
James Shanks
Level 3 Support for Tivoli NetView for UNIX and Windows
Tivoli Software / IBM Software Group
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